Entity | Mortimer Jerome Adler

Mortimer Jerome Adler (December 28, 1902 – June 28, 2001) was an American philosopher, educator, encyclopedist, and popular author. As a philosopher he worked within the Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions. He lived for long stretches in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, and San Mateo, California. He taught at Columbia University and the University of Chicago, served as chairman of the Encyclopædia Britannica Board of Editors, and founded his own Institute for Philosophical Research. While doing newspaper work and taking night classes during his adolescence, Adler had encountered works of men he would come to call heroes: Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, and others, who "were assailed as irrelevant by student activists in the 1960s and subjected to 'politically correct' attack in later decades." His thought evolved so as to refute "philosophical mistakes" as reflected in his 1985 book, Ten Philosophical Mistakes: Basic Errors in Modern Thought. In Adler's view, these errors were introduced by Descartes on the continent and by Thomas Hobbes and David Hume in Britain, compounded and perpetuated by Kant and the idealists and existentialists on the one side, and by John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, and Bertrand Russell and the English analytic tradition on the other. Having corrected, at least to his own satisfaction, these mistakes, he gave answers to philosophic problems in the categories of thought whence they arose, finding the necessary insights and distinctions to do so by drawing from the Aristotelian tradition, as in his other written works.