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A
Tribute to Mortimer J. Adler
by
Peter Redpath
GREAT
PHILOSOPHER STILL AT LARGE
Men
were much bigger and wiser in those days, not like
they are now. Just as in the time of Odysseus breaker
of horses, and honey-tongued Nestor, these were men
bigger than life, men about whom and by whom great
books are written. Shortly before Mortimer J. Adler
died, my friend Gary Dunn had asked the elder Adler
whether any great philosophers had lived during the
twentieth century. To Gary's surprise, Adler named
three: Henri Bergson, Jacques Maritain, and Etienne
Gilson. In my estimation, Adler was wrong. He should
have included a fourth: himself. In the tradition
of Socrates, Adler rarely made that sort of mistake.
Like Socrates, he never claimed to know what he did
not know or not to know what he did know. During the
twentieth century, Adler did not receive his due from
the "professional philosophers" for the magnitude
of his philosophical intellect. Understandable. If
Adler was right about the current state of philosophy,
most contemporary philosophers would have to recognize
that they have largely abandoned the philosophical
tradition. Mortimer Adler died on 28 June 2001, faithful
to the end to the philosophical tradition that he
loved. His passing might occasion some contemporary
thinkers once again to dismiss him. To paraphrase
Adler, though he be "dead in the sense of not jolting
us out of lethargy by his living presence, he is dead
in no other sense. To dismiss him as dead in any other
way is to repeat the folly of the Ancient Athenians
who supposed that Socrates died when he drank the
hemlock."
Peter
A. Redpath, Philosophy Department, St. John's University.
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