Education: Fusilier
(9 of 9)
Adler is already off on his next great project, which, if he succeeds, will make the Syntopicon look like an exam pony. Adler wants to summarize all the knowledge of the Western world in one vast work, comparable to Aquinas' 13th century Summa or Diderot's 18th century Encyclopaedia. His aim: to help end the Babel of Western civilization, in which specialists in various fields not only disagree but cannot even argue with each other in the same language. He does not want to reach conclusions, but simply clear the decks for "some future philosophic genius" by summing up the various positions on each question in all fields. Tentative title of the work: Summa Dialectica. Adler already has a grant for the project from Paul Mellon's Old Dominion Foundation. He does not expect to live to see it finished, but hopes to train a staff to get it done before century's end.
Says he: "There would be a touch of megalomania in the project . . . but without megalomania of this sort, nothing can be done, for we have reached that stage of intellectual decay where little things will not avail."
* There still are a few. * Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen, Euclid, Archimedes, Apollonius, Nicomachus, Lucretius, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Virgil, Plutarch, Tacitus, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler, Plotinus, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Chaucer, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rabelais, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Gilbert, Galileo, Harvey, Cervantes, Francis Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Milton, Pascal, Newton, Huygens, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Swift, Sterne, Fielding, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Gibbon, Kant, The Federalist (by Hamilton, Madison and Jay), J. S. Mill, Boswell, Lavoisier, Fourier, Faraday, Hegel, Goethe, Melville, Darwin, Marx, Engels, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, William James, Freud. Most controversial omissions: Luther, Calvin, Moliere, Voltaire, Dickens, Balzac, Einstein. † New coinage meaning "collection of topics." * Positivists are the philosophical school, virtually dominant in the U.S. and Britain today, which suggests that philosophy is merely a tool for the logical analysis of limited propositions. Adler hates the positivists' guts, and they his. * Students in his first class: Clifton Fadiman, Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers.
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