Synopses & Reviews
Forty-five years ago, Mortimer Adler sat down at a manual typewriter with a list of authors and a pyramid of books. Beginning with "Angel" and ending with "World, " he set out to write 102 essays featuring the ideas that have collectively defined Western thought for more than twenty-five hundred years. The essays, originally published in the "Syntopicon, " were, and remain, the centerpiece of Encyclolpaedia Britannica's "Great Books of the Western World." These essays, never before available except as part of the "Great Books, " are, according to Clifton Fadiman, Adler's finest work.
This comprehensive volume includes pieces on topics such as "War and Peace, " "Love, " "God, " and "Truth" that amply quote the historical sources of these ideas -- from the works of Homer to Freud, from Marcus Aurelius to Virginia Woolf. These essays evoke the sense of a lively debate among the great writers and thinkers of Western civilization. It is almost as if these authors were sitting around a large table face-to-face, differing in their opinions and arguing about issues that are acutely relevant to the present day. Now available in a handsome Scribner Classics edition, "The Great Ideas" also contains Adler's own essay explaining why the twentieth century, though witness to dramatic discoveries and technological advances, cannot understand these achievements without seeing them in the larger context of the past twenty-five centuries.
Adler's purely descriptive synthesis presents the key points of view on almost three thousand questions without endorsing or favoring any one of them. More than a thousand pages, containing more than half a million words on more than two millennia of Westernthought, "The Great Ideas" is an essential work that draws the reader into our civilization's great conversation of great ideas.
Synopsis
Eternity...Sin...Love...the Soul. Enduring concepts such as these have dominated intellectual discussions for thousands of years. Almost 50 years ago, distinguished scholar Mortimer Adler sat down at a manual typewriter and began listing the concepts he deemed most integral to the history of the Western world. He called them The Great Ideas.
The final collection, the centerpiece of Encyclopaedia Britannica's acclaimed Great Books of the Western World, represents Adler's finest work. Presenting major points of view on almost 3,000 questions, Adler includes an Introduction explaining why the 20th century can best understand its achievements by viewing them in the greater context of the past 25 centuries.
About the Author
Mortimer J. Adler has authored fifty books. He is chairman of the Board of Editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Director of the Institute for Philosophical research; and Honorary Trustee of the Aspen Institute. He currently lives in Chicago.
Table of Contents
CONTENTS Foreword
Chapter 1. Angel
2. Animal
3. Aristocracy
4. Art
5. Astronomy and Cosmology
6. Beauty
7. Being
8. Cause
9. Chance
10. Change
11. Citizen
12. Constitution
13. Courage
14. Custom and Convention
15. Definition
16. Democracy
17. Desire
18. Dialectic
19. Duty
20. Education
21. Element
22. Emotion
23. Eternity
24. Evolution
25. Experience
26. Family
27. Fate
28. Form
29. God
30. Good and Evil
31. Government
32. Habit
33. Happiness
34. History
35. Honor
36. Hypothesis
37. Idea
38. Immortality
39. Induction
40. Infinity
41. Judgment
42. Justice
43. Knowledge
44. Labor
45. Language
46. Law
47. Liberty
48. Life and Death
49. Logic
50. Love
51. Man
52. Mathematics
53. Matter
54. Mechanics
55. Medicine
56. Memory and Imagination
57. Metaphysics
58. Mind
59. Monarchy
60. Nature
61. Necessity and Contingency
62. Oligarchy
63. One and Many
64. Opinion
65. Opposition
66. Philosophy
67. Physics
68. Pleasure and Pain
69. Poetry
70. Principle
71. Progress
72. Prophecy
73. Prudence
74. Punishment
75. Quality
76. Quantity
77. Reasoning
78. Relation
79. Religion
80. Revolution
81. Rhetoric
82. Same and Other
83. Science
84. Sense
85. Sign and Symbol
86. Sin
87. Slavery
88. Soul
89. Space
90. State
91. Temperance
92. Theology
93. Time
94. Truth
95. Tyranny and Despotism
96. Universal and Particular
97. Virtue and Vice
98. War and Peace
99. Wealth
100. Will
101. Wisdom
102. World