Word: adler
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DIED. Kurt Adler, 70, chorus master and conductor at New York's Metropolitan Opera (1945-73); after a long illness; in Butler, N.J. A calm man in a frenetic job, Adler said of his chorus, "They are like any other group of people, as good as you make them be and as bad as you let them...
...general prosperity, America has spawned a hard-core group of disaffected people-an all but lost generation of men and women almost permanently without jobs, without education, and without hope of getting either. Our cover story, written by George Russell and researched by Nation Reporter-Researchers Anita Addison, Edward Adler and Agnes Clark, examines this under class and the overwhelming problems that set it apart even among the poor...
...undergraduate at Columbia in the early '20s, Adler became a bulldozer for truth. In class he bombarded John Dewey with long letters pointing out ambiguities and contradictions in his lectures. Dewey benignly suffered Adler for several weeks and then ordered a young assistant to call him off. Adler concedes: "I was an objectionable student, perhaps repulsive." But he later became a popular teacher, first at Columbia, then for 22 years at the University of Chicago, where he and Robert Hutchins set out in 1930 to revolutionize American undergraduate education by teaching the Great Books. While students lionized Adler, senior...
...sense, his critics were right, for Adler still describes himself as an Aristotelian. (When he first started his Aspen programs for executives, Adler and a group actually donned robes to get into the spirit of academe.) He relishes dismissing most of philosophy since Thomas Aquinas as being snarled with pseudo problems. Modern philosophy, claims Adler, got off to "a very bad start" when Descartes and Locke committed the "besetting sin of modern thought": they ignored Aristotle...
Many contemporary philosophers would disagree, and that is largely why, as Adler says, "the Establishment for the most part has ignored me." Yet Adler has never needed their imprimatur for priming non-philosophers with the complicated ideas of Western thought and watching them love it. Says he: "Philosophy is everybody's business...