Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
- Mortimer Adler's
- Syntopicon
Essays
General
Information
- from Great Ideas from the Great Books by M. J. Adler:
The "great ideas" are the basic ideas treated by the great
writers of the Western tradition. In the period after World War II, I directed the
selection and analysis of these fundamental concepts and their collection into two thick
volumes entitled The Great Ideas. These volumes are included in the set of great
writings, from Homer to Freud.
My colleagues and I found 102 basic ideas in these writings, starting alphabetically with
ANGEL and ending with WORLD. These are the concepts that have been at the center of
thought and action in the twenty-five centuries or so of our civilization.
You want to know which of the great ideas have exerted the most influence. One way to
answer your question is to tell you which of the hundred-odd great ideas are most
discussed by writers of the great books. We can assume that the amount of space devoted to
the discussion of an idea gives an approximate measure of how much thought has been
bestowed on it.
- The five most-discussed ideas [of history] are GOD,
KNOWLEDGE, MAN, STATE, and LOVE, in that order...
- from Six Great Ideas by M. J. Adler:
... when the Encyclopaedia Britannica company decided to publish Great
Books of the Western World, which I helped President Hutchins of the University of
Chicago to edit, I prepared, as a guide to the discussion of the great ideas in the great
books, something I called a Syntopicon. It was so called because it was a
collection of some three thousand topics discussed in the great books, organized under
each of 102 great ideas, together with references to passages in the great books topic by
topic. For each of 102 outlines of topics, I wrote an essay setting forth the development
of that idea in the tradition of Western thought, and indicating the major controversies
that had emerged in that development.
...The Syntopicon essays were meant to serve as guides to reading what the most
eminent authors in our Western civilization have thought about the great ideas.
... If I succeed in that aim, I will have helped readers to engage in the business of
philosophy, which is everybody's business not only because nobody can do much thinking, if
any at all, without using the great ideas, but also because no special, technical
competence of the kind that is required for the particular sciences and other specialized
disciplines is required for thinking about the great ideas. Everybody does it, wittingly
or unwittingly. I hope I am right in believing that everyone would wish to do it just a
little better.
- from the Preface to the Syntopicon by M. J. Adler:
[The essays represent a] study of the history of ideas. The chapter on
each of the 102 great ideas presents the record of thought in the form of references to
the great books, organized under each topic ...
The grand research suggested by the existence of the Syntopicon
is not historical ... but philosophical. Stated simply, it is the project of creating in
and for the twentieth century a synthesis or summation of western thought, past and
present, which will serve the intellectual needs of our time, as analogous syntheses or
summations have served antiquity,the Middle Ages, and the period of the enlightenment.
The 102 great ideas, the 1800 other terms, and the 3000 topics of the Syntopicon
are a fair representation of the objects, as the materials to be found in the 443
works here published and the 2600 other works listed in the Additional Readings are a fair
representation of the content, of western inquiry and discussion...
|