Mortimer J. Adler

Mortimer Jerome Adler (December 28, 1902 – June 28, 2001) was an American philosopher, educator, encyclopedist, and popular author. As a philosopher he worked within the Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions. He lived for long stretches in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, and San Mateo, California. He taught at Columbia University and the University of Chicago, served as chairman of the ''Encyclopædia Britannica'' board of editors, and founded the Institute for Philosophical Research.

Biography

Intellectual development and philosophic evolution

While doing newspaper work and taking night classes during his adolescence, Adler had encountered works of men he would come to call heroes: Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, and others, who "were assailed as irrelevant by student activists in the 1960s and subjected to 'politically correct' attack in later decades." His thought evolved so as to refute "philosophical mistakes" as reflected in his 1985 book, '' Ten Philosophical Mistakes: Basic Errors in Modern Thought''. In Adler's view, these errors were introduced by Descartes on the continent and by Thomas Hobbes and David Hume in Britain, compounded and perpetuated by Kant and the idealists and existentialists on the one side, and by John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, and Bertrand Russell and the English analytic tradition on the other. Having corrected, at least to his own satisfaction, these mistakes, he gave answers to philosophic problems in the categories of thought whence they arose, finding the necessary insights and distinctions to do so by drawing from the Aristotelian tradition, as in his other written works.

New York City

Adler was born in Manhattan, New York City, on December 28, 1902, to Jewish immigrants from Germany: Clarissa (Manheim), a schoolteacher, and Ignatz Adler, a jewelry salesman. He dropped out of school at age 14 to become a copy boy for the ''New York Sun'', with the ultimate aspiration of becoming a journalist.. Adler soon returned to school to take writing classes at night, where he discovered the western philosophical tradition. After his early schooling and work, he went on to study at Columbia University and contributed to the student literary magazine, ''The Morningside,'' a poem "Choice" (in 1922 when Charles A. Wagner was editor-in-chief and Whittaker Chambers an associate editor). Though he refused to take the required swimming test for a bachelor's degree (a matter that was rectified when Columbia gave him an honorary degree in 1983), he stayed at the university and eventually received an instructorship and finally a doctorate in psychology. While at Columbia University, Adler wrote his first book: ''Dialectic'', published in 1927.

Adler worked with Scott Buchanan at the People's Institute