Talk:Mortimer J. Adler

message: Adler's opinions are offered as fact, and we can wholly reject his proof of God. The article needs rewriting.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.103.104.48 (talk) 08:53, 11 January 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Needs Criticism 

message: Is it just me, or does this section contain absolutely no reference to a criticism or an opposing point of view, even though there is a reference supporting his argument? Hardly balanced, since I'm sure there are definitely an abundance of criticisms of his argument and even I can think of a dozen holes in his logic just reading it tentatively for the first time. I'm going to go find some sources!
21:58, 11 November 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  God Section 

message: Religion in Modern Times section is plagiarized, strangely enough, from Adler's own essay cited at the bottom of the page.  Is someone going to edit that section?
~~  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.23.143.155 (talk) 17:27, 9 April 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: For my comment on this, see the section below titled The "[blacks] didn't write any good books" Quote.  Isokrates 15:14, 27 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Initial discussions

message: Adler was interviewed on a C-SPAN call-in program hosted by Brian Lamb on the morning of October 31, 1990  where he made some relevant comments:
:[02:37]Adler: We have about a hundred and twenty-five Paideia schools in this country. Two in Chicago. An all-black school and a hispanic school in very bad ghettos. It changed the character of the schools, the teachers -- the neighborhood, even, by doing this.
:[04:24]Lamb: Great books. What is a great book?Adler: Since we just published the second edition of Great Books of the Western World, I will tell you very quickly. The difference between -- let me do it this way. Every year, in the United States, there are forty thousand books published. Of those forty thousand, not one thousand are worth reading once, carefully. Maybe eight-hundred, nine -- but a one thousand limit, the number of books out of the forty thousand are worth reading carefully. Of those thousand, probably not a hundred, or less than a hundred, are worth reading carefully twice. Of those that are worth reading carefully twice, probably not one in every five years is worth reading carefuly three times. A great book is worth reading carefully again, and again, and again for a lifetime, as I've been doing since 1941.Lamb: You're editor-in-chief...Adler: I'll give you a second distinction. There are lots of good books published every year, but they're relevant to one or two or three ideas. The Syntopicon contains a hundred and two ideas. The great books -- the great books -- are relevant to a hundred ideas, eighty-five ideas -- always more than twenty-five. In the Syntopicon, we have a list of recommended readings in each of the hundred-and-two chapters. Some of the books written by blacks, some of the books written by feminist authors, in recent years, are in those additional reading lists. They're not in the set. The reason why we didn't put them in the set is that they're not great books! They deal only with a few ideas. The second criterion of a great book is that it deals with a great number of the hundred and two great ideas. There's a third criterion, and then I'll stop. Every year we have popular bestsellers. They're dead -- they're dead, on the shelf, next year. They're current. The great books are always relevant to every generation for the last 2500 years. We don't regard them as archeological relics. We regard them as contemporary books, always, dealing with our problems today.
:[35:00]Lamb: By the way, we mentioned earlier in the program, that on this list of great books: no blacks.Adler: No blacks -- in the set. Blacks in the additional readings.Lamb: Why not in the set? Do you have any theory on that?Adler: Yes, because I gave you the criterion. The books in the set are relevant to twenty-five or more -- many of them fifty or sixty great ideas. The books written by the blacks that are in the additional readings are relevant to one or two ideas.
--RZiman (talk) 21:19, 30 January 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  October 31, 1990 C-SPAN interview 

message: More on this from an October 25, 1990 article in Chicago Tribune :
:By elevating 60 authors into the pantheon, including James Joyce, Joseph Conrad and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the "Great Books of the Western World" formally join the 20th Century on Thursday.
:However welcome after almost 40 years, the second edition of the "Great Books," which will be introduced in ceremonies at the Library of Congress in Washington, may provoke more discussion (and dissension) for the writers who didn't make the roster than for those who did.
:With the admission of its first female authors (Jane Austen, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather), the extensively revised and modernized "Great Books" represent at least a token victory for feminists. But the absence of black writers from the expanded library of classics seems certain to rile an increasingly vocal body of critics who maintain that the standard literary texts (or canon) slight or ignore the work of women, blacks and various religions and ethnic groups.
:"All that is irrelevant, and we're absolutely prepared for it," declared Mortimer Adler, the editor in chief of the "Great Books." Assisted by a platoon of sub-editors and consultants, Adler ushered the "Great Books" into the first half of the 20th Century, up to 1955, with six additional volumes that include works by George Orwell, Eugene O`Neill, John Maynard Keynes, Claude Levi-Strauss and Bertrand Russell, among the new authors.
:[...] Adler visibly bristled with anticipation over the accusations of Eurocentricism, racism and sexism (also known as phallocentricism) that are bound to come from the loose canonists. Perhaps the strongest fusillade will originate with Afro-American scholars, objecting to the absence of blacks among the great writers. But Adler insisted there are no "Great Books" by black writers before the 1955 cutoff. "There are good books by blacks—about 10—that are worth reading for one or two ideas, and they are in the Syntopicon." Among those considered for canonization by Adler and his editorial and advisory boards (which included one black) were works by Gwendolyn Brooks, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston.
:As for the academic dispute over the canon, Adler said: "Utter nonsense. Rubbish, rubbish, rubbish. . . . We had 90 percent agreement on the board of editors, and you can't get any better than that. This is the canon, and it's not revisable."
--RZiman (talk) 22:55, 30 January 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  October 25, 1990 ''Chicago Tribune'' article 

message: Is it normal for the lead to simply mirror the start of the Biography section?  What I mean is that the intro paragraph seems to be just a simple rephrasing of the start of the Biography.  Just a suggestion, as it stands right now it is readable, if a bit repetitive. 76.177.143.10 23:47, 14 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree.  It was uncritically pasted in by 24.23.36.221 on 23 June 2007.  I say "uncritically", because the original edit included a gross misrepresentation of fact: "...his command of the classics became so great that Columbia University awarded him a doctorate in philosophy...."  I edited this out, but left the rest, since it seemed harmless enough.  If you'd like to delete or reedit the whole intro, be my guest.  Isokrates 14:28, 16 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Intro/Biography 

message: This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as start, and the rating on other projects was brought up to start class. BetacommandBot 04:18, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  WikiProject class rating

message: Sashafresh (talk) 20:17, 19 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Archive Available at the Harry Ransom Center 

message: My name is Tim Lacy, and I finished a dissertation in 2006 that involved extensive archival research on Adler.  I made some changes to the intro (per a note above), and added a "works about" section and some new citations. Timothy.n.lacy (talk) 22:47, 3 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  New Editing 

message: Page 325 of How The Mind Works:
"As recently as the 1940's, the philosopher Mortimer Adler argued that just as there can be no three-and-a-half sided triangle, there can be nothing intermediate between an animal and a human, so human beings could not have evolved."
Is it just me, or is this a complete mischaracterization of Adler's ideas? Adler did argue that there is a radical difference in kind between animals and human beings, but this had nothing to do with essentialism; the idea that it is impossible for the form "human" to change - thus - to evolve.
Is Pinker attacking a straw man here, or is it possible that Adler actually argued this sometime in the 1940's and later changed his mind? If he did, I can't find it anywhere.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.242.10.131 (talk) 23:17, 16 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: In Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, Martin Gardner cites numerous Adler quotes regarding evolution. In What Man has Made of Man, Adler called evolution a "popular myth" in the sense that he did not agree that species could possibly lie on a continuum where one species fades into another. In Problems for Thomists, Adler apparently states that he believes that there are only four "species" (matter, plant, animal, and man) within which each of several "types" was created.  Which basically sounds like he is promoting baraminology.  According to Gardner (which is probably Pinker's source), the quote that Pinker cites above apparently comes from a 1951 lecture at a Catholic Club at the University of Chicago. The "three-and-one-half-sided figure" point is directly quoted by Gardner. According to Gardner, Adler appears to have been promoting either that humans were a separate creation or that mankind evolved but that the soul was at some point inserted into man by God.  Standard Catholic fare for the time.  Bueller 007 (talk) 14:44, 19 October 2020 (UTC)
thread_title: Quote from Steven Pinker's "How The Mind Works"

message: I reviewed arguments from Adler's two-volume set The Idea of Freedom. Cmsreview (talk) 02:14, 5 April 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Added section on Free Will 

message: I removed the wikilink to John G. Cramer since the John Cramer referenced, who lives in Georgia, is not the same guy. Pleasantville (talk) 13:51, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  John Cramer referenced is not John G. Cramer 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified one external link on Mortimer J. Adler. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
*Added  tag to http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4155/is_20010703/ai_n13917760
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20050216033737/http://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/ebarnes/101/101-freedom-topic.htm to http://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/ebarnes/101/101-freedom-topic.htm
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 03:53, 24 May 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified 4 external links on Mortimer J. Adler. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20101127005042/http://radicalacademy.com/adlerarticlemcinerny2.htm to http://radicalacademy.com/adlerarticlemcinerny2.htm
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20110410224053/http://www.word-gems.com/philos.adler.died.html to http://www.word-gems.com/philos.adler.died.html
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20070609175739/http://www.college.columbia.edu/cct/nov02/nov02_forum_adler.php to http://www.college.columbia.edu/cct/nov02/nov02_forum_adler.php
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20011031015112/http://www.radicalacademy.com/adlerdirectory.htm to http://www.radicalacademy.com/adlerdirectory.htm
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 02:09, 6 February 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified (February 2018) 

message: EEng 01:02, 24 March 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  It's sentences like this that are causing the comma shortage 

message: I have added one external link to this on AAPB (american archive of public broadcasting), maybe someone could add relevant info in the body text.
Hym3242 (talk) 21:26, 30 January 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Missing coverage on his NET TV program "Great Ideas" around 1957