Word: columned
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Surrounded by comics, crossword puzzles, cheesecake, dog stories and other newspaper fare, the new column in the Chicago Sun-Times looked as out of place as Plato on a comic-book rack. Even the questions from readers were formidable: What is truth? What is justice? What is love? The columnist's name and title were enough to send Smilin' Jack fans into a tailspin: Dr. Mortimer J. Adler, director of the Institute of Philosophical Research. Yet the column has pulled 150 letters a week since it began appearing last October. This month the Sun-Times will syndicate Philosopher...
This impressive public acceptance comes as no surprise to Mortimer Adler (TIME cover, March 17, 1952), who has never downgraded the human brain, including his own. The column was, in fact, his own idea, proposed last year to Marshall Field Jr., Sun-Times publisher and onetime Adler disciple (in what Adler calls "the Fat Man's class,'' the Great Books course he gives to business executives). Adler's argument was that newspaper readers think: "The American public can understand more than we credit it with...
...readers prove his point. Invited to submit their meatiest questions, they have bombarded him with 2,500. Adler sorts the mail into "C" (useless), "B" (perhaps) and "A" (usable), has already accumulated a three-year supply of A's. These get published in his weekly column, and win a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica's Great Books (54 volumes, value $300), which Adler co-edited in the 1940s with Robert Hutchins. then the University of Chicago's chancellor...
...published letters are answered at scholarly length in the column. For a reader inquiring about the uses of leisure, Adler paraphrased Aristotle: "Business or toil is merely utilitarian. It is necessary, but it does not enrich or ennoble a human life. Leisure, in contrast, consists of all those activities by which a man grows morally, intellectually and spiritually." Asked to define justice, he quoted Justinian-"Render to each his due"-and Mortimer J. Adler-"Treat equals equally and unequals unequally in proportion to their inequality." Occasionally, Adler is stumped by a reader's question...
Greek Against Goliath. "Your name is a Doric column in the pantheon of the great heroes of our glorious nation," said Archbishop Theoklitos, Greek Orthodox Primate of Greece, presenting Grivas with the ancient Greek symbol of victory, a silvered laurel wreath. Grivas was weeping. "Small Cyprus fought Goliath," he said. "It did not succumb." He had consented to a peace that brought self-government to Cyprus but forbade it enosis (union with Greece). He handed the mayor of Athens a small bag of earth taken from his mountain lair, and said emotionally, "This bit of soil, soaked with the blood...