Mortimer Adler never got his bachelor's degree because he skipped a swimming test
Mortimer Adler dropped out of school at 14 to run copy for a New York newspaper, refused Columbia's compulsory swimming test, and still became one of America's best-known philosophers. He wrote How to Read a Book, co-founded the Great Books program and reshaped the fifteenth edition of Encyclopædia Britannica.
Adler was born in Manhattan on December 28, 1902, to German Jewish immigrants, a schoolteacher and a jewellery salesman. Hoping to be a journalist, he left school to work as a copy boy at The New York Sun, then took night classes in writing, where he met Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke and Mill. At Columbia he wrote for the literary magazine and later taught and earned a doctorate in psychology, but his refusal to swim cost him the undergraduate degree. Columbia finally made amends with an honorary one in 1983.
In 1930 Robert Maynard Hutchins, the new president of the University of Chicago, hired him to teach philosophy of law. The philosophy department, including George Herbert Mead, doubted his credentials and blocked him, so he became the first law school professor there with no legal training. With Hutchins he founded the Great Books of the Western World and the Great Books Foundation, and a seminar that impressed the businessman Walter Paepcke led to the Aspen Institute, where Adler taught philosophy to executives. He boasted that he wrote for Joe Doakes rather than other professors; the critic Dwight Macdonald retorted that the author of How to Read a Book should read one on writing.
His outlook was Aristotelian and Thomist. In Ten Philosophical Mistakes, published in 1985, he blamed modern confusion on Descartes, Hobbes and Hume for neglecting Aristotle, whose Nicomachean Ethics he called the ethics of common sense. He described himself as a moderate dualist, holding that the brain is necessary but not sufficient for conceptual thought. His institute spent ten years surveying how hundreds of authors used the word freedom, and concluded there are three kinds: circumstantial, natural and acquired.
Though raised in a secular Jewish family and long taken for a Catholic, he was baptised an Episcopalian in 1984, and in December 1999 he entered the Catholic Church in San Mateo. He died on June 28, 2001.
Source: Mortimer J. Adler
