Who Adler Was
Mortimer Adler: Introduction
Life
- Born 1902, died 2001.
- American philosopher.
- A self-educated high-school dropout.
- Joined Socratic discussion groups in 1921.
Columbia and Chicago
- Studied philosophy at Columbia University, inspired by John Stuart Mill.
- The only PhD in America with no BA, MA, or even a high-school diploma.
- Taught philosophy at the University of Chicago.
- Came into conflict with the university over the curriculum innovations he proposed.
Educational reforms
- Centred on the reading, discussion, and analysis of the Classics.
- An integrated philosophical approach to separate academic disciplines.
- Spent a lifetime making philosophy’s greatest texts accessible to everyone.
- Lived by the slogan that Philosophy is Everybody’s Business.
Major works
- Editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica.
- The Great Books of the Western World programme.
- The Great Books Foundation.
- The Center for the Study of the Great Ideas.
Two famous lines
- No one can be fully educated in school, no matter how long the schooling or how good it is.
- The underestimation of human intelligence is the worst sin of our time.
A high-school dropout who became the only American PhD with no BA or MA is the kind of biography that sounds invented. Mortimer Adler’s actually was. He spent the rest of his ninety-nine years arguing that the great books of the Western tradition belonged to everyone, not to a class of specialists, and that the failure to take ordinary intelligence seriously was the deepest educational sin of his century.
The unlikely education
Adler was born in 1902 in New York City and died in 2001. The book on his life that explains the most is the one that records how he was educated. He dropped out of high school. He never received the standard credential that opens the door to American higher education. He educated himself instead.
The education started in 1921 with Socratic discussion groups, where readers met to discuss a text by working through it together by question and answer. This was the method Adler would later defend for the rest of his life. The discussion groups gave him direct contact with the great philosophical texts and the habit of taking them seriously.
He was inspired in particular by John Stuart Mill, the nineteenth-century English philosopher and political economist. Mill’s intellectual range, his clarity, and his commitment to using philosophy to improve practical life shaped Adler’s later projects. Adler decided he wanted to study philosophy seriously and applied to Columbia University to do it.
What happened next is what makes the biography unusual. Columbia admitted him to graduate study despite his lack of an undergraduate degree, on the strength of his demonstrated knowledge. He completed a doctoral programme and was awarded the PhD. He became the only PhD in America with no BA, no MA, and no high-school diploma. This is a fact worth holding on to. Adler spent his life arguing for the central importance of a rigorous liberal education while himself being the most spectacular American counter-example to the standard route through that education.
He was a high-school dropout who became the only American PhD with no BA, MA, or diploma
He dropped out of high school in New York City. He educated himself through Socratic discussion groups starting in 1921. He was inspired by John Stuart Mill and decided to study philosophy at Columbia, which admitted him to graduate study despite his lack of an undergraduate degree. He spent his life arguing for rigorous liberal education while being the most spectacular counter-example to the standard route through it.
The University of Chicago years
After Columbia, Adler moved to the University of Chicago, where he joined the philosophy faculty. The years at Chicago were productive and turbulent. Adler proposed innovations to the university’s curriculum that put him in conflict with much of the faculty.
His central proposal was that the undergraduate curriculum should be built around the reading, discussion, and analysis of the classic texts in the Western philosophical and literary tradition. Different subjects would be approached through an integrated philosophical lens rather than as separate specialised disciplines. This was a return to an older model of liberal education that the modern research university had largely abandoned.
The conflict was real and lasted years. Most of the senior faculty disagreed with Adler’s proposal. They preferred the modern model in which each discipline was studied through its own specialised methods and the undergraduate moved through a sequence of separate courses, none of them returning to philosophy or to the classical texts in a systematic way. Adler’s proposal would have reorganised the whole undergraduate programme around an integrated foundation. The disagreement was not personal; it was about what a university was for.
Adler did not win the argument at Chicago. He did not give it up, though. The work continued in other forms outside the university, and most of his lasting influence on American education came through those external projects rather than through the curriculum of any one institution.
An integrated reading of the classic texts across all disciplines, rather than separate specialised courses
Adler argued that the undergraduate curriculum should be built around the reading, discussion, and analysis of the classic texts in the Western philosophical and literary tradition, with different subjects approached through an integrated philosophical lens. This was a return to an older liberal-education model that the modern research university had abandoned. Most senior faculty preferred the modern specialised model, and the conflict lasted years.
Philosophy as everybody’s business
What survived the Chicago conflict was Adler’s commitment to making philosophy’s greatest texts accessible to everyone. He spent the rest of his life on this project. The slogan he used was Philosophy is Everybody’s Business. The slogan captures the whole programme.
The argument is straightforward. Philosophical questions (what is just, what is real, what is good, what should we do) are not specialised technical questions belonging to academic philosophers. They are the questions every human being has to answer in some form to live their life. Professional philosophers may have studied the questions more carefully than most people, but the questions themselves belong to everyone. A culture that treats philosophy as a specialist subject for a few has cut ordinary people off from the very questions they cannot avoid asking.
Adler’s lifetime projects were all designed to bring the questions back to a wide audience. He served as editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica, where he shaped how general knowledge was presented to readers. He launched the Great Books of the Western World programme, a publishing project that made fifty-four volumes of classic texts available to American households at modest cost. He founded the Great Books Foundation and the Center for the Study of the Great Ideas, both designed to support ordinary readers working through the texts in discussion groups. His own Great Books course turned into a model for liberal-education curricula at many institutions.
He came to be called the super salesman of philosophy for his role in this work. The label was meant partly as compliment and partly as criticism. Specialist philosophers sometimes thought Adler was popularising at the cost of rigour. Adler thought specialist philosophers had given up on the project of speaking to ordinary readers at all. Both sides had a point. The lasting record is that Adler’s programmes brought serious philosophy to more American homes than any other twentieth-century project did.
His famous line on this is direct. No one can be fully educated in school, no matter how long the schooling or how good it is. The line is doing two pieces of work. It rejects the idea that school can complete a person’s education on its own. It also gestures at what the rest of an education looks like: a lifelong engagement with serious texts and serious questions, undertaken voluntarily by adults whose schooling has only laid the foundation.
Philosophical questions belong to every human being, not to a specialist class of academic philosophers
Questions about what is just, real, good, and what we should do are ones every human has to answer to live their life. Professional philosophers may have studied them more carefully, but the questions belong to everyone. A culture that treats philosophy as a specialist subject for a few has cut ordinary people off from the questions they cannot avoid asking. Adler’s lifetime projects (Encyclopædia, Great Books, Foundation, discussion groups) were all designed to bring the questions back to a wide audience.
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