Word: syntopicon
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Menninger could have found more on the topic in Mortimer Adler's Syntopicon-four listings (v. 15 for faith, 22 for love...
...their contradictions, snubbed revered Educator John Dewey by spoofing pragmatism as bits of useful information at the price of wisdom. As a philosophy professor, he campaigned against universities' traditional system of departmentalization and specialization. As an author, he tried to summarize (in his The Great Ideas-a Syntopicon) the history of Western thought (to be found in the Hutchins-and Adler-edited Great Books of the Western World), to reduce man's search for wisdom to 102 basic ideas. For the last six years, as director of the Institute for Philosophical Research in San Francisco, Generalizer Adler...
Significantly, the book is not the work of a professional economist, but springs from the collaboration of a lawyer and a philosopher. Four years ago Philosopher Mortimer (The Syntopicon) Adler decided that the 400 Great Books were about to have company. That was when a 600-page manuscript on the theory of capitalism thudded onto his desk at his Institute for Philosophical Research in San Francisco. The author: a hornrimmed, bow-tied corporation lawyer named Louis O. Kelso. Except for Kelso's wife, Adler was the first person to see the book; U.S. readers will see it shortly under...
...Adler sees it, the Summa Dialectica must go beyond his Syntopicon of the 102 Great Ideas (TIME, March 17). The Syntopicon merely laid the. groundwork by furnishing a key to the great books of the past. The Dialectica must attempt to treat the great issues (God, Man, Nature, History, Knowledge, Being, etc.) in relation to the present. Each topic may take many years. But eventually, Adler hopes, a great conversation will have begun. It will be a conversation that may never have an end, but if all goes according to plan, men will finally learn at least what the talk...
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...