The Great Ideas; A Lexicon of Western Thought

Forty-five years ago, Mortimer Adler sat down at a manual typewriter. By his side was a list of authors, a pyramid of books and 102 great ideas - the 102 objects of thought that have collectively defined Western thought for more than 2,500 years. He began writing in alphabetical order beginning with "Angel" and ending with "World". The essays, originally published in the Syntopicon, were and remain the centerpiece of Encyclopaedia Britannica's Great Books of the Western World. These essays, never before available except as part of the Great Books, are, according to Clifton Fadiman, Adler's finest work. Now available in a beautifully produced trade edition, The Great Ideas contains a newly composed essay, explaining why the twentieth century, though witness to dramatic discoveries and technological advances, cannot understand these achievements without seeing them in the greater context of the past twenty-five centuries. Each essay - "War and Peace", "Love", "God", "Truth" - treats each idea as if the original authors - from Homer to Freud, from Marcus Aurelius to Virginia Woolf - whose writings the ideas are drawn from, were sitting around a table, deep in conversation. His purely descriptive synthesis presents the key points of view on almost 3,000 questions without endorsing or favoring any one of them. More than a thousand pages, containing more than half a million words on more than two millennia of Western thought, The Great Ideas is a fitting capstone to the career of Mortimer J. Adler.