Mortimer Adler
American philosopher and educator (1902 to 2001); taught at Columbia University and the University of Chicago, chaired the board of editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica and founded the Institute for Philosophical Research.
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Mortimer Adler did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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Their wordsThe world, certainly, is multicultural, and so we should be taught about its cultural diversity.
↗Multiculturalism, Part I (The Great Ideas Online no. 53)thegreatideas.org 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsThe line that divides the multicultural from the transcultural is the line that separates all matters of taste or preference from all matters concerned with the truth and falsity of the propositions being entertained or judged.
↗Multiculturalism, Part I (The Great Ideas Online no. 53)thegreatideas.org 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsIn the first place, the extreme skeptic refutes himself.
↗Multiculturalism, Part I (The Great Ideas Online no. 53)thegreatideas.org 3rd of 3 in this piece
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Our reading
Their wordsHow can the individual cope with bad fortune? The commonsense answer is, in a word, by strength of character.
↗Why Strength of Character Is Needed to Lead a Good Life (from The Time of Our Lives, 1970; The Great Ideas Online no. 40)thegreatideas.org 1st of 6 in this piece
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Their wordsBased on the common-sense truism that you can often have too much of a good thing, temperance consists in the will-power to resist the kind of good fortune that makes an excess of such goods available.
↗Why Strength of Character Is Needed to Lead a Good Life (from The Time of Our Lives, 1970; The Great Ideas Online no. 40)thegreatideas.org 2nd of 6 in this piece
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Their wordsWhat is required to make the moral choices we ought to make in order to work for the end we ought to seek -- a whole life that is really good because it involves all the things that are really good for a man, all of them in the right order and proportion -- is moral virtue, which is nothing but a habitual disposition to prefer a good life to a good time, to choose what is really good in the long run over what is apparently good here and now.
↗Why Strength of Character Is Needed to Lead a Good Life (from The Time of Our Lives, 1970; The Great Ideas Online no. 40)thegreatideas.org 3rd of 6 in this piece
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Their wordsThe remedy is medical not moral. What is called for is the recommendation of some form of psychotherapy, not hortatory remarks about virtue or a good moral character.
↗Why Strength of Character Is Needed to Lead a Good Life (from The Time of Our Lives, 1970; The Great Ideas Online no. 40)thegreatideas.org 4th of 6 in this piece
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Our reading
Curing a disorder that blocks good choices does not by itself give the power to make them
Their wordsBut when the medical problem is solved the moral problem remains. The removal by therapy of an incapacitation for making the right choices does not automatically confer the power of making them.
↗Why Strength of Character Is Needed to Lead a Good Life (from The Time of Our Lives, 1970; The Great Ideas Online no. 40)thegreatideas.org 5th of 6 in this piece
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Their wordsFinally, let it be said, as emphatically as possible, that these dispositions of character and of mind, which are virtuous insofar as they are employed in making a good life, cannot be formulated in rules or guidelines for action.
↗Why Strength of Character Is Needed to Lead a Good Life (from The Time of Our Lives, 1970; The Great Ideas Online no. 40)thegreatideas.org 6th of 6 in this piece
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