Mortimer Adler
Mortimer J. Adler was an American philosopher, educator, and author whose career spanned university teaching, encyclopedic editing, and lay theology across the twentieth century.
Born on December 28, 1902, in New York City, Adler was educated at Columbia University, where he later taught. He subsequently joined the faculty of the University of Chicago, extending his work as a university teacher to one of the country's major academic institutions. His roles in higher education placed him at the center of intellectual life for several decades before his death on June 28, 2001, in San Mateo.
Beyond the classroom, Adler served as chairman of the board of editors of Encyclopædia Britannica, reflecting his work as an encyclopedist engaged with the organization and dissemination of knowledge in English. He founded the Institute for Philosophical Research, an organization dedicated to the systematic study of philosophical ideas. He also worked as a television presenter, bringing his interests as a philosopher and educator to broader public audiences. In addition to these roles, Adler engaged with questions of theology as a lay theologian, a dimension of his work that ran alongside his philosophical and educational pursuits.
The recognition Adler received over the course of his career came from multiple directions. He was awarded the Charles Frankel Prize, the St. Louis Literary Award, the National Humanities Medal, the John Jay Award, and the Aquinas Medal, a range of honors that reflects the breadth of his activity as a philosopher, writer, and public educator.
Throughout his career, Adler worked consistently across the intersecting fields of philosophy, education, and encyclopedic scholarship. His founding of the Institute for Philosophical Research and his leadership at Encyclopædia Britannica represent two of the most concrete institutional expressions of his long engagement with the organization of philosophical and humanistic knowledge. These roles, together with his teaching at Columbia University and the University of Chicago and his work as a lay theologian, define the recurring concerns that shaped his professional life from his early years in New York City to his death in San Mateo at the age of ninety-eight.
Quotes by Mortimer Adler
Mortimer Adler's insights on:
....a good book can teach you about the world and about yourself. You learn more than how to read better; you also learn more about life. You become wiser. Not just more knowledgeable - books that provide nothing but information can produce that result. But wiser, in the sense that you are more deeply aware of the great and enduring truths of human life.
More consequences for thought and action follow the affirmation or denial of God than from answering any other basic question.
Political democracy cannot flourish under all economic conditions. Democracy requires an economic system which supports the political ideals of liberty and equality for all. Men cannot exercise freedom in the political sphere when they are deprived of it in the economic sphere.
I suspect that most of the individuals who have religious faith are content with blind faith. They feel no obligation to understand what they believe. They may even wish not to have their beliefs disturbed by thought. But if God in whom they believe created them with intellectual and rational powers, that imposes upon them the duty to try to understand the creed of their religion. Not to do so is to verge on superstition.
The ability to retain a child's view of the world with at the same time a mature understanding of what it means to retain it, is extremely rare - and a person who has these qualities is likely to be able to contribute something really important to our thinking.
Work that is pure toil, done solely for the sake of the money it earns, is also sheer drudgery because it is stultifying rather than self improving.
In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.
To agree without understanding is inane. To disagree without understanding is impudent.
There is no more irritating fellow than the man who tries to settle an argument about communism, or justice, or liberty, by quoting from Webster.