Mortimer Adler

Mortimer J. Adler is the co-author (with Charles Van Doren) of How To Read a Book, the classic Kyle read with a constant religious-text overlay and explicit cross-reference to his Learning, No Greater Responsibility essay-in-progress. Adler’s central thesis — reading as Active Reading, the reader as a “catcher in baseball” who demands more of both self and text — anchors most of the threads Kyle pulled from the book.

Across the notes, Adler supplies a chain of ideas Kyle maps onto his own framework: Triangulation (reading several books on one subject in relation to one another), Progressive Summarization (stating a book’s unity in a single sentence), and Live the Library (“reading what others have read”). Adler also surfaces in Kyle’s Death of Expertise thread (the relatively ignorant wrongly disagreeing with the learned; opinion vs. knowledge) and the Curse of Expertise note (modern science “written by experts for experts”). Kyle registers one respectful disagreement: where Adler is skeptical of fiction’s reach, Kyle argues fiction can stretch the mind as much as non-fiction. Adler’s examples — Charles Darwin on “doctrines felt as facts,” Plato, Aristotle, Tolstoy, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley — recur throughout.

Context: Mortimer J. Adler (1902–2001) was an American philosopher and educator, a champion of the Great Books of the Western World program and author of the 1940 classic How to Read a Book, revised in 1972 with Charles Van Doren.

Where this appears

• How To Read a Book — co-author with Charles Van Doren; the source of the Active Reading thesis and the Triangulation / Progressive Summarization / opinion-vs-knowledge threads Kyle read against scripture and his own essay-in-progress.