Mortimer J. Adler

Mortimer J. Adler was an American author, educator, and philosopher who championed the repopularization of the Great Books and Great Ideas curriculum of study. A prolific scholar, he was the author or editor of more than fifty books, including editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica. His Synopticon was an exhaustive index of the most significant ideas put forth within Western Civilization. Other highly influential books included How to Read a Book (1940) and How to Think About War and Peace (1944). Deemed controversial and somewhat eccentric for his zealous classics-based approach to education, Adler was a world federalist and an idealist who described his most influences as Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas.