In assessing the perpetual thinking machine that goes by the name of Mortimer Adler, Harvard Sociologist David Riesman says, "There is something marvelously relentless about him." Both the marvel and the relentlessness shine through in Adler's newly published Ten Philosophical Mistakes (Macmillan; $12.95), which takes to task a Who's Who of the major philosophers since Thomas Aquinas. In the process, the book tells the rest of the world not only what to think but also why it should follow the latest gospel according to Mortimer.
A man of sweeping intellectual interests and no visible pedagogic doubts, Adler spun out Ten Philosophical Mistakes in 15 mornings of whirlwind writing. "Writing is the easy part," he explains. "It's the thinking beforehand that takes time." Many of Adler's 33 previous books were written just as quickly, and their titles and tone are no less imperative. A sampling: How to Think About War and Peace, Reforming Education, How to Read a Book, How to Think About God.
Writing is not the half of what the unquenchable Adler, 82, manages to do. A former professor of the philosophy of law at the University of Chicago, he recently completed a worldwide junket to promote the Encyclopaedia Britannica, of which he is editorial board chairman. He was a founder of Britannica's 54- volume Great Books of the Western World, and personally wrote every one of the 5,000- to 10,000-word essays defining the 102 Great Ideas that constitute the heart of a prodigious index to the Great Books. In addition, he started and still directs the Institute for Philosophical Research, which is devoted to publishing learned tracts. He passionately pushes his Paideia program, an experimental educational system that is imbuing selected elementary and high schools in Atlanta, Oakland and Chicago with a rigorous curriculum taught in part by the Socratic method. Adler's prescription for such sustained productivity: "I take almost no exercise, and I work harder every year than the year before."
Adler has made a point of pondering and whacking at the errors of his chosen victims in modern philosophy for more than 50 years. As a brash undergraduate at Columbia, he once confronted the august philosopher John Dewey so sharply on a theological issue that the great man stormed from the room growling, "Nobody is going to tell me how to love God." In Ten Philosophical Mistakes Adler makes only an occasional swipe at Dewey and leaves God pretty much alone. But he takes on Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Hobbes, Marx and a passel of other post-16th century thinkers, whose common and "disastrous" mistake, says Adler, was to invent new kinds of wisdom without building on the ancient truths. "The modern philosophers start as if they had no predecessors," he scolds.