The Adler Archives Directory Many of Dr. Adler's books are available through The Radical Academy Bookstore. Books by Mortimer J. Adler A Syntopical Approach to The Great Ideas from The Great Books The Syntopicon as an Instrument of Liberal Education by Mortimer Adler. The Syntopicon serves the end of liberal education to the extent that it facilitates the reading of the great books and, beyond that, the study and teaching of them. To make the nature of this educational contribution clear, it is necessary to distinguish between the integral and the syntopical reading of great books.
Integral reading consists simply in reading a whole book through.
But syntopical reading does not consist simply in reading parts of a book rather than the whole. It involves the reading of one book in relation to others, all of them relevant to the consideration of the same topic. In some cases, as the References show, whole works are cited along with passages from other works, which may be as short as a paragraph or as long as a chapter or a series of chapters. Neither of these two types of reading can ever be a substitute for the other, nor can either be taken as sufficient in itself. On the contrary, each is incomplete without the other.