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.

Mortimer Jerome Adler was born in New York City in December 1902, the son of a Jewish jewellery salesman. He left high school at fourteen to work as a copyboy at the New York Sun, took night classes, and entered Columbia, where he refused to satisfy a swimming requirement and so received his bachelor's degree only retroactively in 1983; he completed his doctorate in psychology at Columbia in 1928. After a brief stint at Columbia he was recruited in 1930 by Robert Maynard Hutchins to the University of Chicago, where he taught philosophy of law for twenty-two years.

His books include Dialectic (1927), What Man Has Made of Man (1937), the perennial bestseller How to Read a Book (1940; rewritten with Charles Van Doren in 1972), The Idea of Freedom (two volumes, 1958–1961), The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes (1967), Aristotle for Everybody (1978), Six Great Ideas (1981), the Paideia Proposal trilogy (1982–1984), and Ten Philosophical Mistakes (1985). He served as chairman of the editorial board of Encyclopaedia Britannica, edited the fifty-four-volume Great Books of the Western World, and devised its Syntopicon of 'great ideas'.

Adler was a thoroughgoing Aristotelian-Thomist who defended the unity of philosophical truth, the existence of God by way of cosmological argument, and a dialectic of opposing answers as the proper method of philosophy; through the Great Books programme and the Aspen Institute he made the case for liberal education in the public sphere as much as in the academy. He was received into the Episcopal Church in 1984 and into the Roman Catholic Church near the end of his life, and died at San Mateo, California, in June 2001.