Propaedia

As the Syntopicon was a topical index of ideas in Great Books of the Western World, the Propaedia was an outline of knowledge for the latest print edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica. As the latter's online version explains in its entry on itself,

"Upon [Robert Maynard ] Hutchins’s retirement in 1974, [Mortimer J.] Adler succeeded him as chairman of the Board of Editors. Under the stewardship of Adler, [William] Benton, and Charles E. Swanson (president of the company from 1967 to 1985), a vast editorial effort was assembled, resulting in the first publication of Britannica 3, or the 15th edition, in 1974. The new set consisted of 28 volumes in three parts serving different functions: the Micropædia: Ready Reference and Index, Macropædia: Knowledge in Depth, and Propædia: Outline of Knowledge. ..."

In its entry on "Encyclopaedia", the section on Content arrangement concludes,

"The Propædia specifically was a reader’s version of the circle of learning on which the set had been based and was organized in such a way that a reader might reassemble in meaningful ways material that the accident of alphabetization had dispersed."

While there is not a specific Britannica article on Propaedia, there is one at Wikipedia which includes the outline of its 10 Parts, 41 Divisions, and 167 Sections.

Adler On: Topical Index to the Works of Mortimer J. Adler

This resource is still on our website, but you might have missed it. Here's the link.

I'm always tempted to call it The AdlerOn.

P.S. The B&N link no longer works.

Wittgenstein 'On Certainty'

On Certainty (Uber Gewissheit 1949-1951) by Ludwig Wittgenstein, edited by G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, translated by Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe (1969-1975), at PrawfsBlawg

The secret libraries of history

Fiona Macdonald on 'the places where writing has been hidden for centuries', at the BBC.

This free online encyclopedia has achieved what Wikipedia can only dream of

How can a reference work be "authoritative, comprehensive, and up-to-date"?

Nikhil Sonnad examines the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at Quartz.

From the Center: Adler on Nature; Sakezie on Socrates and skepticism;

Recent communications with members of the Center for the Study of The Great Ideas included:

• Dr. Pricilla Sakezie on Socratic Skepticism
• Mortimer Adler on nature as one of the Great Ideas

Resisting Delusions

John Lyon reviews Chance or Reality and Other Essays by Stanley L. Jaki at The University Bookman.

They Began a New Era

James Salter reviews The Wright Brothers by David McCullough at The New York Review of Books.

The reconstruction of philosophy: Will philosophy once again be able to bury its undertakers? If so, how?

Scheduled for 2:30 pm–4:00pm Eastern Time, Holy Apostles College and Seminary Metropolitan Philosophy Roundtable Inaugural Session

Chair: Marvin Peláez (University Abat Oliba/Adler-Aquinas Institute)

Speaker: Michael B. Mangini (Adler-Aquinas Institute), “Using justice to bury philosophy’s undertakers”

This paper focuses on the relation between particulars and universals in the order of human knowing and the order of human doing. In the order of knowing, the cogitative sense grasps the intentional content of the forms of particulars, which permits the intellectual activities of apprehension, judging, and reason and makes the connection between the particular sensed thing and its universal nature. Behind this process are the principles of contradiction and its corollaries. In the order of doing, practical reason begins with the principle of synderesis and what is known, and applies universal notions to particular situations. The virtue of prudence, which connects knowledge with action, discovers the means proper to the desired end. Justice is an organizational virtue that orders relations between and among human beings and contributes to Thomistic personalism, which balances biases toward individualism or communitarianism. The proper balance between these two contrary opposites encourages beneficial whole-part relations in human organizations. My desire is that by leveraging the natural human sense of justice into conversations about its metaphysical roots, philosophy, properly speaking, can once again bury its undertakers.

Speaker: Peter A. Redpath (Adler-Aquinas Institute/Aquinas School of Leadership), “Has philosophy ever really buried its undertakers? If not, what can?”

Anyone familiar with Étienne Gilson’s masterful monograph The Unity of Philosophical Experience likely remembers his famous claim therein that “the first law to be inferred from philosophical experience” is: “Philosophy always buries its undertakers.” While Gilson’s monograph catalogs a list of historical cases in which philosophy in the West apparently has buried its undertakers, in this talk I wish to consider the possibility of an alternative thesis consisting of two parts: (1) that while Gilson is right that, historically, many false understandings of philosophy have been intellectually buried in the West, philosophy did not bury them; and (2) in this work, Gilson chiefly used a more remote chief principle, not philosophy, to prove his case. Knowing precisely what this chief principle precisely was, I suggest, can help us understand how, in our time, we can use is to help intellectually to bury those who seek to bury philosophy.

Commentators: Mary Boland (Aquinas Leadership International), Eugene Callahan (Cardiff University, UK), Robert Delfino (St. John’s University, NY), Peter DeMarco (Priority Thinking Institute), Richard Fafara (Adler-Aquinas Institute), Herb Hartmann (Catholic University of America), Joseph Jordan (Aquinas Leadership International), Joseph Indelicato (Catholic Education Foundation/Caritas Consulting), Sebastian Mahfood (Holy Apostles College and Seminary), Alice Ramos (St. John’s University, NY), Br. Owen Sadlier (St. Francis College, NY), Frank Slade (Emeritus Professor, St. Francis College, NY)

Livestream of video from the Conference will be at the Holy Apostles College and Seminary YouTube Channel.

Next session scheduled for 4:00pm.

On the origin of Fox News

Jay Rosen at PressThink

"...Roger Ailes exploited a weakness in establishment journalism that in 1996 was dimly understood by its practitioners—or not understood at all. There was a submerged ideology in American newsrooms, populated as they were by people who were more cosmopolitan than 'country,' more secular than religious. Journalists in the U.S. were vaguely progressive in the sense of welcoming social change (up to a point) and identifying (up to a point) with those who had grievances against traditional authority. Certainly there weren’t many denizens of the American newsroom eager to 'stand athwart history, yelling Stop,' or who had supported the Vietnam War, or who saw Ronald Reagan as a cultural hero. And there weren’t many alert to the ideological undertow in a mission statement still popular among journalists: comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

"Critics on the left are correct to say that if this is liberalism it is very weak tea. But critics on the right are correct to say that it sure isn’t neutral professionalism. Roger Ailes understood that the 'mainstream' journalists his network was built to attack had an ideology that they were unwilling to defend, because they had never recognized it as an ideology. Instead they used terms like 'news values.' They talked about standards and credibility and objectivity and being a good professional. They still do this."

Britannica's Mortimer Adler Muses on Truth, Taste and Tomorrow

From forty years ago, Jerene Jones interviewed Mortimer Adler at People.

The interview drew one published letter to the editor.

From the Center: Crichton on speculation, Adler on knowledge

Recent communications to members of the Center for the Study of The Great Ideas included:

• Michael Crichton on speculation in the media
• Mortimer Adler on knowledge as one of The Great Ideas
• A Thought for the Day on the cost of education
• Ian Ravenscroft Philosophizes about philosophizing
• Justin P. McBrayer on moral facts

From the Center: Understanding the world; Adler on Justice; Olmsted reviews Baggini;

Recent communications to members of the Center for the Study of The Great Ideas included:

• Mortimer Adler on Science or Philosophy as means of understanding the world
• Adler on justice as one of the Great Ideas
• Julian baggini on eating and virtue
• An early bad review of Huckleberry Finn

Here on the weblog, we've added Philosophy TV to the sidebar blogroll.

What the Fate of The New Republic Reveals

Russ Douthat at The New York Times.

"The New Republic as-it-was, the magazine I and others grew up reading, was emphatically not just a 'policy magazine.' It was, instead, a publication that deliberately integrated its policy writing with often-extraordinary coverage of literature, philosophy, history, religion, music, fine art.

"It wasn’t just a liberal magazine, in other words; it was a liberal-arts magazine, which unlike many of today’s online ventures never left its readers with the delusion that literary style or intellectual ambition were of secondary importance, or that today’s fashions represented permanent truths."

P.S. Any suggestions of other print or online publications that could be considered a 'liberal-arts magazine'?

Pyrrho wins the lottery

At Existential Comics

From the Center: Ethics in Montaigne's Essays; Adler on Britannica 15th

This past week's communications to members of the Center for the Study of The Great Ideas included:

• A continuation of the discussion of ethics based on Montaigne's Essays; and
• People magazine's March 31, 1975 interview of Mortimer Adler on "Encyclopaedia Britannica's radically new and controversial 15th edition".

P.S. Additional versions of Montaigne's Essays can be found at The Online Books Page.

Encyclopedic knowledge

This profile of in the Encyclopaedia Britannica editor in chief Dale Hoiberg University of Chicago Magazine includes this on the publication's recent past

"The company has been profitable for more than ten years running, after a rough patch in the 1990s as it made the transition from print to digital. Britannica’s old encyclopedia competitors have largely fallen off the map, says communications director Tom Panelas, AM’79: 'It’s pretty much us and Wikipedia.'"

and its future.

"Hoiberg sees the encyclopedia’s new format as rich with possibilities, able to track current trends and, once old editions are digitized, to trace the history of a given topic over time."

(In case you're wondering, the article does not mention Great Books of the Western World.)

Isaiah Berlin Against the Current

Mark Lilla discusses the work of Isaiah Berlin at The New York Review of Books.

'as the Enlightenment gained adherents over subsequent centuries and the wider public saw the benefits of free inquiry, pressure on the new philosophers and scientists to address the wider implications of their work eased, leaving those who challenged them looking like irrational, anti-philosophical reactionaries. By making the question What can we know? paramount, they suppressed the more unsettling one, Why and what should we want to know?

'Berlin’s achievement was to have used the history of ideas to recover this latter question and make it urgent once again.'

Otto A. Bird on The Two Cultures

A surprising, if not startling, omission in the original formulation of the Snow-Leavis controversy over the two cultures was the lack of any reference to philosophy. Yet certainly the most fundamental of all the issues on which they were divided was a philosophical one, namely that regarding our best and most fundamental knowledge. --Otto A. Bird (1914-2009), Cultures in Conflict: An Essay in the Philosophy of the Humanities (1976) p. 125

(Terrence Berres)

Against Intuition

Christopher Shea in The Chronicle Review on the experimental-philosophy [x-phi] movement

A key question for experimental psychology is how it proposes to get from descriptive findings to philosophically sound conclusions about what we ought to do, or what ought to count as sound knowledge.

So far, it appears, the discipline tends to be better at tearing down such conclusions, or trying to.

(via Arts & Letters Daily)

--Terrence Berres