Word: adler
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Writing is not the half of what the unquenchable Adler, 82, manages to do. A former professor of the philosophy of law at the University of Chicago, he recently completed a worldwide junket to promote the Encyclopaedia Britannica, of which he is editorial board chairman. He was a founder of Britannica's 54- volume Great Books of the Western World, and personally wrote every one of the 5,000- to 10,000-word essays defining the 102 Great Ideas that constitute the heart of a prodigious index to the Great Books. In addition, he started and still directs the Institute...
...Adler has made a point of pondering and whacking at the errors of his chosen victims in modern philosophy for more than 50 years. As a brash undergraduate at Columbia, he once confronted the august philosopher John Dewey so sharply on a theological issue that the great man stormed from the room growling, "Nobody is going to tell me how to love God." In Ten Philosophical Mistakes Adler makes only an occasional swipe at Dewey and leaves God pretty much alone. But he takes on Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Hobbes, Marx and a passel of other post-16th century thinkers, whose...
...Adler's personal hero-philosopher is Aristotle, whose Ethics Adler has read no fewer than 25 times. While conceding advances in logic, political theory and the philosophy of science, Adler argues that, except for Aquinas' massive Summa Theologiae, barely an ethical or metaphysical yard has been gained in all the centuries since Aristotle. He is particularly hard on the empiricists, notably Locke. According to Adler, Locke's worst error was to posit that ideas are what each individual consciously experiences and since different individuals' experiences inevitably vary, ideas also vary. Adler finds such notions "repugnant to reason." He calls...
...asserting that the human mind fundamentally is a sensory organ, rather than an instrument that can also intellectualize. He dismasts Darwin for categorizing man as simply an animal with higher sensory perceptions, rather than an organism that, alone among living creations, can conceive such abstractions as right and wrong. Adler is equally hard on determinists like Marx on grounds that if all consequences are predetermined, then no man can be held responsible for his acts...
Throughout the book, Adler persistently pulls both modern philosophy and the reader back to immutable human rights and moral responsibilities as defined in classic philosophy. He has no patience with any suggestion that these truths may be simply old opinions. "If philosophy were mere opinion," he writes, "there would be no philosophical mistakes." The fact that his own Great Books program at Britannica is chockablock with the works of Locke, Hume, Darwin and the others is, to Adler, no mistake at all. "It is important to know errors," he says. "A full understanding of truth is to understand the errors...