With Max Weismann, he founded The Center for the Study of The Great Ideas.Īdler long strove to bring philosophy to the masses, and some of his works (such as How to Read a Book) became popular bestsellers. 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). 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 also served on the Board of Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica since its inception in 1949, and succeeded Hutchins as its chairman from 1974. Adler founded and served as director of the Institute for Philosophical Research in 1952. Adler also taught philosophy to business executives at the Aspen Institute.Īdler and Hutchins went on to found the Great Books of the Western World program and the Great Books Foundation. Adler was the first "non-lawyer" to join the law school faculty. Adler's competence in the field " and resisted Adler's appointment to the University's Department of Philosophy. Mead) had "entertained grave doubts as to Mr. 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. While at Columbia University, Adler wrote his first book: Dialectic, published in 1927. 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. Wagner was editor-in-chief and Whittaker Chambers an associate editor). He went on to study at Columbia University and contributed to the student literary magazine, The Morningside, (a poem "Choice" in 1922 when Charles A.
Adler soon returned to school to take writing classes at night where he discovered the works of men he would come to call heroes: Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, John Stuart Mill and others. He dropped out of school at age 14 to become a copy boy for the New York Sun, with the ultimate aspiration to become a journalist. He worked for Columbia University, the University of Chicago, Encyclopædia Britannica, and Adler's own Institute for Philosophical Research.Īdler was born in New York City on December 28, 1902, to Jewish immigrants. He lived for the longest stretches in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, and San Mateo. As a philosopher he worked with Aristotelian and Thomistic thought.
Mortimer Jerome Adler was an American educator, philosopher, and popular author.
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