For young readers
About ages 8 to 12. Read it together, or on your own.
Mortimer Adler was born in New York City in 1902. He left school at fourteen to work as a copy boy at a newspaper. Then he found the books of the great thinkers, and he loved them so much that he spent the rest of his long life reading them, teaching them and helping other people read them too.
Adler had a giant idea. He wanted to make a map of the big ideas in all the great books. If you wondered, "What did the great writers think about courage?", the map would show you where each of them talked about it, book by book and page by page.
He and a team of readers worked for years to make it. It is called the Syntopicon, which means "a collection of topics," and it fills the first two volumes of the set this ladder follows.
Try this: make your own idea map
Pick one big idea, like courage, friendship or home. Think of three stories or books you know. Where does the idea show up in each one? Write the idea at the top of a page and the three places under it. Now you have made a tiny Syntopicon!
For teens and adults
The full lesson.
Mortimer J. Adler (1902–2001)
Adler grew up in New York, left high school at fourteen to work at the New York Sun, and took classes at Columbia University, where John Erskine's General Honors seminar on the classics shaped his life. Though he never finished high school, he earned a PhD in 1928, taught at Columbia, and in 1930 went to the University of Chicago at the invitation of its president, Robert Maynard Hutchins.
- At Chicago, he and Hutchins taught the great books in seminars, and in 1946 and 1947 they helped start the Basic Program for adults and the Great Books Foundation.
- He was associate editor of the first edition of Great Books of the Western World (1952) and made its Syntopicon. He was editor-in-chief of the second edition (1990).
- In 1952 he founded the Institute for Philosophical Research, and he led seminars on the great books at the Aspen Institute for many years.
- As chairman of Britannica's board of editors, he planned the 1974 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
- In the 1980s he led the Paideia project, which asked schools to teach every child through a mix of direct teaching, coaching and Socratic seminars.
- He wrote more than fifty books, many for general readers.
What the Syntopicon is
An ordinary index tells you where a word appears in one book. The Syntopicon is an index of ideas across a whole library. Adler and his editors chose about a hundred great ideas (102 in the 1952 edition) and, over most of a decade, with a team of readers, went through every work in the set to record where each idea is discussed.
Each idea has its own chapter, and each chapter has five parts: an introductory essay by Adler on the idea and its history; an outline of topics, which breaks the idea into narrower questions; the references, which list, for each topic, the passages in the set by volume and page; cross-references to related ideas; and a list of additional readings outside the set. The 1990 edition added references to the new 20th-century volumes.
Key idea
How readers use it
- Start with a question you care about, such as whether a law can be unjust, or what light is.
- Find the idea it belongs to, and read Adler's essay for an overview.
- Choose a topic in the outline that fits your question, and look up the passages listed for it.
- Read them in order of time, from the oldest to the newest, taking notes on each author's answer.
- Compare the answers in your own words, and decide what you think.
Worked example: A syntopical reading, in miniature
- On this ladder, the idea is The heavens and the planets. It lists the rungs that take up the question.
- Read in order: Aristotle's On the Heavens (a still Earth at the center), Ptolemy's Almagest, Copernicus's On the Revolutions, Kepler, Galileo, then Newton's Principia.
- For each, write one sentence: what does the author claim, and what is the main reason given?
- Compare: which reasons were about observations, which about mathematics, and which about physics?
Answer: You have traced one question through two thousand years, the way the Syntopicon was meant to be used.
Adler's other books
Adler's books are still under copyright, so we describe them here and link to library listings. Many public libraries have them.
| Book | What it is |
|---|---|
| How to Read a Book (1940; revised with Charles Van Doren, 1972) | The classic guide to active reading, from the first look at a book to comparing many books on one subject. |
| Philosopher at Large (1977) | His autobiography, including the story of the great books programs and the Syntopicon. |
| Aristotle for Everybody (1978) | Aristotle's main ideas, explained for readers who have never studied philosophy. |
| How to Think About God (1980) | A philosopher's case, made by reason alone, on the question of God's existence. |
| Six Great Ideas (1981) | Six ideas he thought every citizen should think about: truth, goodness and beauty, and liberty, equality and justice. |
| The Paideia Proposal (1982) | A short plan for schooling the same for all children, built on seminars and coaching as well as lessons. |
| How to Speak, How to Listen (1983) | A companion to How to Read a Book, on speeches, conversation and discussion. |
| Ten Philosophical Mistakes (1985) | Errors he believed modern philosophy made, and how to correct them. |
| We Hold These Truths (1987) | The ideas behind the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. |
| How to Think About the Great Ideas (2000) | Short chapters drawn from his television discussions of the great ideas. |
Our own index of ideas
Inspired by the Syntopicon, this ladder has its own Great Ideas index. It is much smaller and simpler, and it is ours: about sixty ideas, named and grouped in our own way, each listing the rungs on this ladder that take it up. It grows as new rungs are built. It is not the Syntopicon's list, and it does not try to replace it; for passage-by-passage references, the Syntopicon itself is the tool to use.
Going deeper
Context, the big questions, and how later books answered.
Why a list of ideas at all? Adler believed that the great authors, for all their differences, were talking about the same few great questions, and that showing this would invite readers into the conversation instead of leaving them lost in sixty volumes. Critics replied that any such list fixes the questions in advance, and that the meaning of an idea changes from age to age. Dwight Macdonald's famous 1952 review in The New Yorker mocked the whole project as a shortcut to culture.
How an index changes reading. Before the Syntopicon, a reader who wanted to compare twenty authors on justice had to find the passages alone. The index made comparison easy, but some readers worried that it would tempt people to jump between passages without reading the whole works.
Topics across ladders. A modern version of the same idea is the hyperlink. On this site, the "Read the source" cards on Physics, Math, Chemistry and Biology topics point back to the great books where those ideas began, and each rung points forward to the topics that grew out of it.
Making your own. Many serious readers keep their own index: a notebook with an idea at the top of each page and references below. Over years it becomes a map of your own reading, and it is the best way to remember what you read.
Talk about it together
- If you made a map of ideas from the books you have read, which three ideas would be on it?
- Is it better to read a whole book, or to read what many books say about one idea? When is each better?
- Adler worked for years on an index so that other people could read better. What would you work that hard on?
- Which idea in our Great Ideas index would you like to follow first, and why?
- Can a list of "great ideas" ever be complete? What might be missing?
- What question would you like to ask several great writers at once?