Mortimer Jerome Adler was an American philosopher, educator, encyclopedist, and popular author.
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27 Facts About Mortimer Adler
2.
Mortimer Adler lived for long stretches in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, and San Mateo, California.
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3.
Mortimer Adler taught at Columbia University and the University of Chicago, served as chairman of the Encyclopædia Britannica Board of Editors, and founded his own Institute for Philosophical Research.
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5.
Mortimer Adler soon returned to school to take writing classes at night, where he discovered the western philosophical tradition.
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6.
Mortimer Adler worked with Scott Buchanan at the People's Institute and then for many years on their respective Great books efforts.
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7.
In 1930, Robert Hutchins, the newly appointed president of the University of Chicago, whom Mortimer Adler had befriended some years earlier, arranged for Chicago's law school to hire him as a professor of the philosophy of law.
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8.
Mortimer Adler was the first "non-lawyer" to join the law school faculty.
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9.
In 1952, Mortimer Adler founded and served as director of the Institute for Philosophical Research.
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10.
Mortimer Adler served on the Board of Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica, compiled its Syntopicon and later Propaedia, and succeeded Hutchins as its chairman from 1974.
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11.
Mortimer Adler introduced the Paideia Proposal which resulted in his founding the Paideia Program, a grade school curriculum centered around guided reading and discussion of difficult works .
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12.
Mortimer Adler long strove to bring philosophy to the masses, and some of his works became popular bestsellers.
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13.
Mortimer Adler was an advocate of economic democracy and wrote an influential preface to Louis O Kelso's The Capitalist Manifesto.
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14.
Mortimer Adler was often aided in his thinking and writing by Arthur Rubin, an old friend from his Columbia undergraduate days.
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15.
Mortimer Adler took a long time to make up his mind about theological issues.
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17.
Mortimer Adler explained that while he had been profoundly influenced by a number of Christian thinkers during his life,.
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18.
Myers notes that Mortimer Adler finally "surrendered to the Hound of Heaven" and "made a confession of faith and was baptized" as an Episcopalian in 1984, only a few years after that interview.
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19.
In December 1999, in San Mateo, where he had moved to spend his last years, Mortimer Adler was formally received into the Catholic Church by a long-time friend and admirer, Bishop Pierre DuMaine.
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20.
In contrast, Mortimer Adler believed that other theories or doctrines try to answer more questions than they can or fewer than they should, and their answers are mixtures of truth and error, particularly the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant.
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21.
Mortimer Adler was a self-proclaimed "moderate dualist" and viewed the positions of psychophysical dualism and materialistic monism to be opposite sides of two extremes.
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22.
Mortimer Adler believed that the brain is only a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for conceptual thought; that an "immaterial intellect" is requisite as a condition; and that the difference between human and animal behavior is a radical difference in kind.
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23.
Mortimer Adler defended this position against many challenges to dualistic theories.
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24.
Mortimer Adler's study concluded that a delineation of three kinds of freedom – circumstantial, natural, and acquired – is necessary for clarity on the subject.
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25.
Mortimer Adler stressed that even with this conclusion, God's existence cannot be proven or demonstrated, but only established as true beyond a reasonable doubt.
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26.
Mortimer Adler believed that, if theology and religion are living things, there is nothing intrinsically wrong about efforts to modernize them.
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27.
In 1963, Mortimer Adler married Caroline Pring, his junior by thirty-four years; they had two children, Douglas and Philip.
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