Welcome to the first issue of The Great Ideas Online, our new e-journal dedicated to ideas -- The Great Ideas that underlie all aspects of our lives. As an extension of our print journal, Philosophy is Everybody's Business, we hope it will serve as an interactive resource that embraces a wide range of topics, issues, and information.

You'll find The Great Ideas Online to be timeless and immediate, energetic and thoughtful, serious and, at times, even humorous. It presents points of view that contribute to a deeper understanding of our world. Through articles, essays, letters to the editor, and question and answer forums, a "typical" issue of the journal may contain a mixture of political and social commentary, insights into philosophical issues, analyses of topics related to education, and in-depth discussions of ideals and insights vital to our moral and intellectual growth -- as individuals, as parents, and as citizens in participatory government.

Some issues may only feature letters to Dr. Adler and his response, or a "resources" listing of items such as Dr. Adler's audio and video programs, articles, etc., available through the Center. For your reference, we also plan to maintain an archive of past issues, which you can search or browse at any time.

And, through our weekly exchange of information and understanding, we hope to stay in closer touch with you. Toward that end, we invite you to contribute* your thoughts, questions, suggestions, pertinent articles, or Internet links you may wish to share with other members -- we value your opinion.

Our fervent hope is that you will profit from and enjoy the intellectual stimulation of The Great Ideas Online and that you'll look forward to finding it in your e-mail box. May it provide you with what Plutarch called "the refreshment of philosophy."

We thank you for your continued support of the Center.

Max Weismann, Editor

PHILOSOPHY IS EVERYBODY'S BUSINESS

It cannot be too often repeated that philosophy is everybody's business. To be a human being is to be endowed with the proclivity to philosophize. To some degree we all engage in philosophical thought in the course of our daily lives. Acknowledging this is not enough. It is also necessary to understand why this is so and what philosophy's business is. The answer, in a word, is Ideas. In two words, it is Great Ideas -- the Ideas basic and indispensable to understanding ourselves, our society, and the world in which we live.

These Ideas constitute the vocabulary of everyone's thought. Unlike the concepts of the special sciences, the words that name the Great Ideas are all words of ordinary, everyday speech. They are not technical terms. They do not belong to the private jargon of a specialized branch of knowledge. Everyone uses them in ordinary conversation. But everyone does not understand them as well as they can be understood, nor has everyone pondered sufficiently the questions raised by each of the Great Ideas. To think one's way through to some resolution of the conflicting answers to these questions is to philosophize.

This journal aims to do no more than to provide some guidance in this process. We will limit the consideration of these Ideas to an elementary delineation that will try to achieve three results for you.

First, it should give you a surer grasp of the various meanings of the word you use when you talk about the Idea.

Second, the delineation of each Idea should make you more aware than you normally are of questions or issues that you cannot avoid confronting if you are willing to think a little further about the Idea -- basic ones, ones that human beings have been arguing about over the centuries.

Third, in the consideration of each Idea, we are led to the consideration of other Ideas. How does our understanding of truth affect our understanding of goodness and beauty? How does our understanding of what is good and bad carry us not only to an understanding of what is right and wrong, but also to an understanding of justice, and how does that affect our understanding of liberty and equality as well?

If we succeed in these aims, we will have helped you engage in the business of philosophy, which is everybody's business not only because nobody can do much thinking, if any at all, without using the Great Ideas, but also because no special, technical competence of the kind that is required for the particular sciences and other special disciplines is required for thinking about the Great Ideas. Everybody does it, wittingly or unwittingly.

I hope I am right in believing that everyone would wish to do it just a little better.

Mortimer J. Adler, Chairman and Co-Founder,
Center for the Study of The Great Ideas

A TWENTIETH-CENTURY DELUSION by Mortimer Adler

A cultural delusion is widespread in the twentieth century. The extraordinary progress in science and technology that we have achieved in this century has deluded many of our contemporaries into thinking that similar progress obtains in other fields of mental activity. They unquestioningly think that the twentieth-century is superior to its predecessors in all the efforts of the human mind.

Some of our contemporaries make this inference consciously and explicitly. They do not hesitate to declare that the twentieth-century has a better, a more advanced and sounder, solution of moral and political problems, that it is more critically penetrating in its philosophical thought, and that it is superior in its understanding of, and even in its wisdom about, the perennial questions that confront human beings in every generation.

The Great Ideas and issues and the Great Conversation concerning these ideas that can be found in the Great Books is not for them. Their minds are closed to the possibility that they may be wrong in the inference they have made without examining the evidence to the contrary.

But there may be some -- perhaps many -- among our contemporaries of which this is not true. They may be prone to the twentieth-century delusion as a result of the indoctrination they received from an inadequate schooling, or as a result of the currents of journalistic opinion that fill the press, the radio, and television. But they may still be open to persuasion that they have mistakenly believed in the superiority of the twentieth-century in all fields of intellectual endeavor. It may be possible to show them that, though the twentieth century has made some contribution to the understanding of the Great Ideas, the significance of that contribution cannot be understood without seeing it in the light of the greater contribution made in earlier epochs of the last twenty-five centuries.

A syntopical approach to the Great Books is for them because that is precisely what it does. It is the apt remedy for what I have called the twentieth-century delusion, which psychiatrists would call a grandiose delusion. The Great Ideas dramatically exhibit the Great Conversation that has been going on across the centuries, in which any unprejudiced and undeluded mind will see the merit of what has been thought and said. Such wisdom as has been achieved is in no way affected or conditioned by time and place.

Unprejudiced and undeluded readers of the Great Books and this approach will, I think, discover for themselves that, with respect to the understanding of the Great Ideas, differences remain over the centuries. It is almost as if the authors were all sitting around a large table talking face-to-face with one another, differing in their opinions, disagreeing, and arguing.

An auditor of the conversation going on would soon come to regard them as if they were all alike as eminent contemporaries, in spite of their differences in time, place, and language. That auditor would not regard what he heard as voices from the remote past talking about problems no longer of vital concern. Instead, he or she would become fascinated by the fact that all the things he or she heard being said concerned matters of current interest and importance.

A study of the Great Books declares to its readers that our Western civilization is the civilization of the dialogue or symposium, which is the Great Conversation in the Great Books about the Great Ideas.

WHAT IS AN IDEA? by Mortimer Adler

In the vocabulary of daily speech, the word "idea" is generally used to name the subjective contents of our own minds -- things that each of us has in his or her own mind. This use of the word predominates in a large portion of modern psychology, concerned as it is with something called "the association of ideas" or "the stream of consciousness" -- with the images we experience in dreams or in acts of imagination. It is a kind of omnibus term that covers all the contents of our minds when we have any conscious experience -- our sensations and perceptions, our images and memories, and the concepts we form.

But that, obviously, is not the way the word "idea" is being used when we engage one another in the discussion of ideas. In order for a discussion between two or more persons to occur, they must be engaged in talking to one another about something that is a common object of their conjoined apprehension. They do not have a common object to discuss if each of them is speaking only of his own ideas in the subjective sense of the term.

Consider, for example, a number of individuals arguing with one another about liberty and justice, about war and peace, or about government and democracy. They probably differ in the way they subjectively think about these matters. Otherwise, they would not find themselves arguing about them. But it must also be true that they could not be arguing with one another if they did not have a common object to which they were all referring. That common object is an idea in the objective sense of the term.

These two uses of the one word "idea" -- the subjective use of it to signify the contents of an individual's conscious mind and the objective use of it to signify something that is a common object being considered and discussed by two or more individuals -- may be a source of confusion to many. We might try to eliminate the source of confusion by restricting the use of the word "idea" to its subjective sense and substituting another mode of speech for "idea" in its objective sense. We might always use the phrase "object of thought" instead. Thus, freedom and justice, war and peace, government and democracy might be called objects of thought.

One other example may help to reinforce what has just been said. Let us turn from our thinking to our sense-experience of the world in which we live. We are in a room sitting at a table. On the table is a glass of wine. You are facing the light and I am sitting with my back to it. We have, therefore, different subjective impressions or perceptions of the color of the table and of the wine in the glass. But in spite of our divergent subjective perceptual experiences, we know that we are sitting at one and the same table and looking at one and the same glass of wine. We can put our hands on the table and move it. We can each take sips out of the same glass of wine. Thus we know that the table and the glass of wine are one and the same perceptual object for both of us. It is that common object that we can talk about as well as move and use.

We live in two worlds: (1) the sensible world of the common perceptual objects that we move around and use in various ways and (2) the intelligible world of ideas, the common objects of thought that we cannot touch with our bodies or perceive with our senses, but that, as thinking individuals, we can discuss with one another.

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

Mortimer Adler in Hollywood?

It may interest some of you to know that in 1937, Mortimer Adler published a book entitled "Art and Prudence: A Study in Practical Philosophy." A major part of that book was devoted to "Cinematics", wherein Dr. Adler adapted the principles of Aristotle's "Poetics" to the art of the motion picture.

Several years later, this came to the attention of Will Hays, then President of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. He summoned Dr. Adler to Hollywood to serve as a consultant on an annual retainer that was more than half his salary as Professor at the University of Chicago. He served for five years until Hays retired. Eric Johnston, who succeeded Hays, asked Dr. Adler to stay on for another year to draft his first annual report. When it was released to the press, it was hailed (to Dr. Adler's astonishment) as "the sounding of a new voice in the movie industry."

TEST YOUR GENERAL KNOWLEDGE *

Something to think about.

1) How long did the Hundred Years War last?
2) Which country makes Panama hats?
3) From which animal do we get catgut?
4) In which month do Russians celebrate the October Revolution?
5) What is a camel's hair brush made of?
6) The Canary Islands in the Atlantic are named after what animal?
7) What was King George VI's first name?
8) What color is a purple finch?
9) Where are Chinese gooseberries from?
10) How long did the Thirty Years War last?

Each month, the first member to send in the correct answers to our quiz, will receive an autographed copy of Dr. Adler's latest book, "Adler's Philosophical Dictionary: 125 Key Terms for the Philosopher's Lexicon."

* Submitted by Robert Sutherland

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