Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
Philosophy:
- Mortimer Adler's
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- 102 Syntopicon
Essays
- Editor's note: Below, you will find a
listing of Adler's 102 Great Ideas of history. Each term, eventually, when posting is
completed, will become an active link-icon, allowing the reader to access Adler's essays
on each topic.
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- Currently, more than 20 "Ideas" below
are active link-icons.
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- After clicking on an icon, the reader will
find another link, at the top of each page, this time, to my own
writings, "Editor's 1-Minute Essays,"
featuring the particular Great Idea under review.
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- These "Editor's Essays" are a kind of notebook
of my current findings, quick summary statements of the essentials of what Adler, in his
various works, and other thinkers have said about these subjects.
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- Why is any of this important?
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- Adler once commented that the Great Ideas represent the
ABCs of clear thinking, a basic building-block vocabulary of thought -- a primer as
prerequisite to more creative intellectual pursuit. Stated another way, doesn't it make
sense to find out what the great teachers of history have said about important issues
before trying to "reinvent the wheel"?
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- Here's a recent pop-culture example that may help: Princeton
mathematician, John Forbes Nash, Jr., featured in the movie, A Beautiful Mind,
received a Nobel Prize for a paper he wrote on game theory which represented, essentially,
a slight modification of one of the Great Ideas, "Wealth." In 1776 Adam Smith
published his ground-breaking Wealth of Nations which offered the world the
now-famous metaphor of self-interest's guiding "invisible hand" as a prime mover
within capitalism. Nash, building upon this thought, advocating an enlightened
self-interest, asserted that even more is gained, not only for the individual but for
society as a whole, if the one initiating activity considers not only his own advantage
but that of the entire group or society as well.
- Angel
- Animal
- Aristocracy
- Art
- Astronomy
- Beauty
- Being
- Cause
- Change
- Citizen
- Constitution
- Courage
- Custom & Convention
- Definition
- Democracy
- Desire
- Dialectic
- Duty
- Education
- Element
- Emotion
- Eternity
- Evolution
- Experience
- Family
- Fate
- Form
- God
- Good & Evil
- Government
- Habit
- Happiness
- History
- Honor
- Hypothesis
- Idea
- Immortality
- Induction
- Infinity
- Judgment
- Justice
- Knowledge
- Labor
- Language
- Law
- Liberty
- Life & Death
- Logic
- Love
- Man
- Mathematics
- Matter
- Mechanics
- Medicine
- Memory & Imagination
- Metaphysics
- Mind
- Monarchy
- Nature
- Necessity & Contingency
- Oligarchy
- One & Many
- Opinion
- Opposition
- Philosophy
- Physics
- Pleasure & Pain
- Poetry
- Principle
- Progress
- Prophecy
- Prudence
- Punishment
- Quality
- Quantity
- Reasoning
- Relation
- Religion
- Revolution
- Rhetoric
- Same & Other
- Science
- Sense
- Sign & Symbol
- Sin
- Slavery
- Soul
- Space
- State
- Temperance
- Theology
- Time
- Truth
- Tyranny
- Universal & Particular
- Virtue & Vice
- War & Peace
- Wealth
- Will
- Wisdom
- World
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- Editor's note: In his final address
to the nation, from the Oval Office, on January 11, 1989, President Ronald Reagan, the man
whom detractors tried to label as intellectually light-weight, offered a parting comment,
one wise and insightful but likely unappreciated:
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- "I
won a nickname, The Great Communicator. But I never thought it was my style or
the words... It was the content. I wasn't a great communicator. But I communicated great
things -- and they didn't spring full bloom from my brow; they came from ... our wisdom
and our belief in the principles that have guided us for two centuries."
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- President Reagan understood, as most do not, that enduring and praiseworthy expressions
of the human spirit - great rhetoric, great art, great literature, even great music -
are esteemed to be so, largely, not as a result of style but of substance; not of form but
of content. Reagan's critics, unable to defeat him on the merits of his arguments,
attempted to minimize his success by claiming it all to be simply a matter of style:
"He's a great communicator, just a great showman with a big smile and a funny story
to tell" - this is all just sleight-of-hand, polite demagoguery, an attempt to shift
the emphasis from content to form; because if Reaganomics
and his foreign policies had failed, we, today, would hear not a
single word about his having been a "Great Communicator."
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- Invariably, all forums of human expression, if they are destined
to receive history's lasting applause, will address the great questions of life that have
inspired and burdened men and women for centuries. Mortimer Adler well understood
this. His Great Ideas,
without fail, will be found imbedded in any art form or
manifestation of the human spirit that survives, what Lincoln
called, "the silent artillery of time."
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