Mortimer Adler 1902 – 2001

Mortimer Jerome Adler was an American philosopher and educator and the most prolific philosophical popularizer of his generation. After studies at Columbia and a long teaching career at the University of Chicago, where he co-founded with Robert Hutchins the Great Books of the Western World series, he led the Institute for Philosophical Research and the Aspen Institute. His How to Read a Book, The Idea of Freedom, and the long series of short books he produced into his nineties argued for a broadly Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophical realism, the importance of liberal education for free citizens, and the thesis that philosophy is everybody's business.