Mortimer Adler Biography

Mortimer J. Adler	Mortimer Jerome Adler Born: 1902-12-28 Birthplace: New York City Died: 2001-06-28 Location of Death: San Mateo, CA Race: White Religion: Roman Catholic Field: Philosopher Famous for: How To Read a Book
Top 500 Influencial People #500 Field: Philosopher

Mortimer Jerome Adler was an American philosopher and author.

Adler was born in New York City. After dropping out of high school at age 14, he worked as a copy boy for the New York Sun. Wanting to become a journalist, he took writing classes at night where he discovered the works of men he would come to call heroes: Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, John Stuart Mill and others. He went on to study philosophy at Columbia University. Though he failed to complete the necessary physical education requirements for a bachelor's degree, he stayed at the university and eventually was given a teaching position and was awarded a doctorate in philosophy.

Adler was appointed to the philosophy faculty at the University of Chicago in 1930, where he met its president Robert Hutchins, with whom he founded the Great Books of the Western World program. He founded and served as director of the Institute for Philosophical Research in 1952. For a long time he was Chairman of the Board of Editors of the Encyclopædia Britannica, and influenced many of the policies of the 15th 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. Adler was often aided in his thinking and writing by Arthur Rubin, an old friend from his Columbia undergraduate days.

Adler took a long time in his own life to make up his mind about theological issues. He considered himself a pagan when he wrote How to Think About God in 1980. In Volume 51 of the Mars Hill Audio Journal (2001), Ken Meyer includes his 1980 interview with Adler, conducted after How to Think About God was published. Meyer reminisces, "During that interview, I asked him why he had never embraced the Christian faith himself. He explained that while he had been profoundly influenced by a number of Christian thinkers during his life, ...there were moral—not intellectual—obstacles to his conversion. He didn't explain any further."

Meyer goes on to point out that Adler finally "surrendered to the hound of heaven" and "made a confession of faith and was baptized" only a few years after that interview. Offering insight into Adler's conversion, Meyer quotes Adler from a subsequent 1990 article in Christianity magazine: "My chief reason for choosing Christianity was because the mysteries were incomprehensible. What's the point of revelation if we could figure it out ourselves? If it were wholly comprehensible, then it would just be another philosophy." In 2000, Adler became a Roman Catholic. He can be considered a Catholic philosopher due to his lifelong participation in the Neo-Thomist movement, despite not being a Catholic for most of this time.

In his 1980 interview, Meyer playfully asked Adler which single book he would want to take on a desert island. Adler responded with:

1. Thucydides' The History of the Peloponnesian War

2. 5 or 6 of Plato's Dialogues
Aristotle's Ethics & Politics

3. Augustine of Hippo's Confessions
3. Plutarch's Lives
4. Dante's Divine Comedy
5. some plays of Shakespeare
6. Montaigne's Essays
7. Gulliver's Travels
8. Locke's Second Treatise of Government
9. Tolstoy's War and Peace

In the summer of 1981 Adler conducted a seminar at the Aspen Institute in Colorado based on his book Six Great Ideas. It was filmed by PBS for a popular television series hosted by Bill Moyers the following year.

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. Adler was also a world federalist.