Word: adler
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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...
...long, hard effort against the Dragon of Deweyism, Huckster Adler deserves the fur-lined spittoon. But before he sallies forth again, he should straighten out his armor. His recent encyclopedist tendency, his readiness to defend either side of a contradiction (made out to be a virtue in your article), his over-all intellectual hedgehopping show the same irreverence and inconclusiveness that make the philosophies of William James and John Dewey what they are: anti-wisdoms. Mr. Adler may have provided his own criteria for what he chooses to call "Great Ideas," but he has yet to discover a criterion...
...Great Books discussion groups enthusiast, I have known and admired Mortimer Adler for years, but I little suspected the amazing contribution he is and has been making to the improvement of mankind until I read your article . . . Pragmatism has never been or intended to be the philosophical panacea for the world's ills and weaknesses. Peirce and James never so intended it. Nor Dewey, as far as that goes. At least not during his most creative period. In its proper philosophical fields-politics, education, sociology-pragmatism served (and is still serving) a useful purpose...
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...