Word: adler
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
After reading your article on Mortimer Adler in the March 17 issue, I was astonished but pleased to learn that someone has, at last, done something to eliminate the automatic acceptance of biased philosophy, and has offered something that is not so one-sided which will give the student an opportunity to think for himself and draw his own conclusions...
...Mortimer Adler gets his way, I'm going to quit school...
Weil, who once tried to hire Chicago's Philosopher Mortimer Adler (TIME, March 17) as a Vice President in Charge of Thinking, thought that "retailing is a backward and disorganized industry." He would also admit that Macy's had lost ground, was not growing in Manhattan as it had done in the '20s. He prophesied: "It will do so again in the '50s. If it doesn't, I will have been a failure...
...Adler is already off on his next great project, which, if he succeeds, will make the Syntopicon look like an exam pony. Adler wants to summarize all the knowledge of the Western world in one vast work, comparable to Aquinas' 13th century Summa or Diderot's 18th century Encyclopaedia. His aim: to help end the Babel of Western civilization, in which specialists in various fields not only disagree but cannot even argue with each other in the same language. He does not want to reach conclusions, but simply clear the decks for "some future philosophic genius" by summing...
...Dostoevsky, William James, Freud. Most controversial omissions: Luther, Calvin, Moliere, Voltaire, Dickens, Balzac, Einstein. † New coinage meaning "collection of topics." * Positivists are the philosophical school, virtually dominant in the U.S. and Britain today, which suggests that philosophy is merely a tool for the logical analysis of limited propositions. Adler hates the positivists' guts, and they his. * Students in his first class: Clifton Fadiman, Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers...