Mortimer Jerome Adler (December 28, 1902 – June 28, 2001) was an American Aristotelian philosopher and author.
He was born in New York City, the son of an immigrant jewelry salesman. He dropped out of school at 14 years of age and went to work as a secretary and copy boy at the New York Sun, hoping to become a journalist. After a year, he took night classes at Columbia University to improve his writing.
It was there that he became interested, after reading the autobiography of the great English philosopher John Stuart Mill, in the great philosophers and thinkers of Western civilization. Adler was driven to continue his reading after learning that Mill had read Plato when he was only five years old, while he had not read him at all. A book by Plato was lent to him by a neighbor and Adler became hooked. He then decided to study philosophy at Columbia University, where he received a scholarship. But he was so focused on philosophy that he failed to complete the requisite physical education course to earn his bachelor's degree.
Nevertheless, his command of the classics became so great that Columbia University awarded him a doctorate in philosophy a few years after he began teaching there.
Adler became an instructor at Columbia University in the 1920s. He continued to participate in the Honors program which had been started by John Erskine. This program focused on the reading of the great Classics. His tenure at the university included study with such eminent thinkers as Erskine and John Dewey, the famous American pragmatist philosopher. This kind of environment inspired his early interest in reading and the study of the "Great Books" of Western Civilization. He also promoted the idea that philosophy should be integrated with science, literature, and religion.
His earliest work resulted in the publication of Dialectic in 1927, which focused on a summation of the great philosophical and religious ideas of Western Civilization, ideas influenced by his fascination with medieval thought and sensibility.
This combination of interests dominated his career at educational and research institutions such as the University of Chicago, the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill), the Institute for Philosophical Research, and the Aspen Institute. Adler helped to found the latter two institutes. At the Aspen Institute, he has been teaching business leaders the classics for more than 40 years. He was also on the board of the Ford Foundation and the board of the Encyclopedia Britannica, where his influence was clearly shown regarding its policies and programs. He is also the co-founder, along with Max Weismann, of The Center for the Study of The Great Ideas.
Adler was appointed to the philosophy faculty at the University of Chicago in 1930. This appointment led to a conflict with the faculty because of the innovations he proposed in the curriculum. The changes he proposed were based on his central interests in the reading, discussion, and analysis of the Classics and an integrated philosophical approach to the study of the separate academic disciplines. These conflicts with the faculty led to his reassignment, in 1931, to the Law School as professor of the philosophy of law.
While Adler continued his educational reforms on a more conservative basis, the concept of seminars on "great books" and "great ideas" continued to become integrated into programs at other educational institutions. In 1952, his work in this area culminated in the publication of the "Great Books of the Western World" by the Enclyclopedia Britannica company.
The work on which he had concentrated since his Columbia University days, together with a lecture series and essays produced in Chicago, resulted in several publications, including The Higher Learning in America (1936), What Man Has Made of Man (1937), and his best-selling How to Read a Book, published in 1940 and still in print, occasionally revised and updated since first published. In 1943, his How to Think about War and Peace, written in the social and political climate of WWII, was published and he continued his advocacy of a popular, yet intelligent, approach to public education.
Throughout his career as a philosopher and educator, Adler has written voluminously, consistently focusing on a multi-disciplinary and integrated approach to philosophy, politics, religion, law, and education. Such works as The Common Sense of Politics (1971), Six Great Ideas (1981), and The Paideia Program: An Educational Syllabus (1984), reflect this concern. He has also been involved with Bill Moyers in creating a series of video programs focusing on the subject of the American Constitution and biographies of the justices of the Justices of the Supreme Court and has also been involved in producing videos on the Great Ideas.
In 1977, Adler published an autobiography entitled Philosopher at Large, which was followed later by another autobiographical account entitled A Second Look in the Rearview Mirror: Further Autobiographical Reflections of a Philosopher at Large (1992). He has spent a lifetime making philosophy's greatest texts accessible to everyone. As he has written, "No one can be fully educated in school, no matter how long the schooling or how good it is." And throughout his teaching career, Adler remained devoted to helping those outside academia educate themselves further. No one, no matter how old, should stop learning, according to Adler. And he himself has written more than twenty books since he turned 70. Now Adler, at the age of 95 and currently residing in central California near San Francisco, is working on his 60th book, The New Technology: Servant or Master?, proving to all that he does indeed subscribe to the advice he gives to others.
Dr. Adler, a self-described pagan for most of his life, converted to Christianity in 1984 and was baptized by an Episcopalian priest on April 21 of that year (see his account in Chapter 9 of his second autobiography A Second Look in the Rearview Mirror: Further Autobiographical Reflections of a Philosopher at Large). In December of 1999, he converted to Roman Catholicism.
He died quietly at his home in California on June 28, 2001.
When Mortimer J. Adler died, America lost a true original, a scholar and teacher whose unabashed championing of the “great books†had profoundly shaped the curricula at Columbia, the University of Chicago, and American intellectual life in general. He was one of the 20th century’s most influential and iconoclastic intellects.
