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Adler's personal hero-philosopher is Aristotle, whose Ethics Adler has read no fewer than 25 times. While conceding advances in logic, political theory and the philosophy of science, Adler argues that, except for Aquinas' massive Summa Theologiae, barely an ethical or metaphysical yard has been gained in all the centuries since Aristotle. He is particularly hard on the empiricists, notably Locke. According to Adler, Locke's worst error was to posit that ideas are what each individual consciously experiences and since different individuals' experiences inevitably vary, ideas also vary. Adler finds such notions "repugnant to reason." He calls up the Thomistic view, derived from Aristotle, that ideas are the basic concepts, the universal truths by which we understand experiences. Those truths are immutable. Otherwise, mankind would have no common base of understanding nor any common denominators such as good and justice, or, indeed, truth. Adler believes uncompromisingly in those denominators.
He takes on Hobbes, Hume and others for asserting that the human mind fundamentally is a sensory organ, rather than an instrument that can also intellectualize. He dismasts Darwin for categorizing man as simply an animal with higher sensory perceptions, rather than an organism that, alone among living creations, can conceive such abstractions as right and wrong. Adler is equally hard on determinists like Marx on grounds that if all consequences are predetermined, then no man can be held responsible for his acts.
Throughout the book, Adler persistently pulls both modern philosophy and the reader back to immutable human rights and moral responsibilities as defined in classic philosophy. He has no patience with any suggestion that these truths may be simply old opinions. "If philosophy were mere opinion," he writes, "there would be no philosophical mistakes." The fact that his own Great Books program at Britannica is chockablock with the works of Locke, Hume, Darwin and the others is, to Adler, no mistake at all. "It is important to know errors," he says. "A full understanding of truth is to understand the errors it corrects."
Adler's one reservation about his latest work is that it presents only ten major mistakes. There are, he says, at least 18. But Adler wants to reach a mass audience, and 18 mistakes would have taken up too many pages. Says he: "I try to write a 200-page book that costs about $12. I hate $18 books." Adler knows that with such an approach he can expect to be roundly ignored in philosophical journals, an expectation that is dryly confirmed by Kenneth Seeskin, philosophy chairman at Northwestern. Says Seeskin: "Professional philosophers as a rule don't read Adler's work."