It's no wonder that Mortimer J. Adler was able to write such a deep analysis of reading in How to Read a Book after having spent so much time indexing the ideas behind The Great Books of the Western World.

Indexing requires a solid inspectional read at minimum, but will often go deeper into contexts which require at least some analytical reading. To produce the Syntopicon, one must go even further into analytical reading to provide the proper indexing of ideas so that they may be sub-categorized and used for deeper analysis for things such as comparison and contrast of those ideas.

https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Democratic-Culture-Mortimer-Intellectual/dp/0230337465

The Dream of a Democratic Culture: Mortimer J. Adler and the Great Books Idea (Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History) by Tim Lacy

Syntopical Construction by [[Dan Allosso]]

https://www.amazon.com/GREAT-BOOKS-David-Denby/dp/0684835339

Adler & Hutchinson's Great Books of the Western World was an encyclopedia-based attempt to focus society on a shared history as their common ground. H. G. Wells in his World Encyclopedia thesis attempts to forge a new "moving" common ground based on newly evolving knowledge based on distilling truth out of science. Shared history is obviously much easier to dispense and spread about compared to constantly keeping a growing population up to date with the forefront of science.

How could one carefully compose and juxtapose the two to have a stronger combined effect?

How could one distribute the effects evenly?

What does the statistical mechanics for knowledge management look like at the level of societies and nations?

link to https://hypothes.is/a/abTT1KPDEe6nqxPx4fXggw

Compare this with Hutchins and Adler's solution undertaken just a few years following this beginning in the early 1940s and finally published in 1952: The Great Books of the Western World.

These books speak toward the idea of living well and understanding mankind, but don't have the same deeply edited and critical synthesis viewpoint.

https://lifelonglearn.substack.com/p/second-unboxing

https://lifelonglearn.substack.com/p/unboxing-the-great-books

The Syntopicon Vault by Dan Allosso

reply to u/Paddy48ob at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/17jscyk/comment/k80z1nn/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Thanks for this pointer. As a note, when I compare my 1954 version against the photo of the 1990 edition (which has fewer pages), it's obvious that the "1. The ends of education" section in the 1954 edition is significantly more thorough with more references (and supplementary data) which don't exist in the 1990 edition. The 1990 edition presumably removes the references for the books which they may have removed from that edition (though it may have actually been even more--I didn't check this carefully).

Just comparing the two pages that I can see, I don't see any references to the added texts of the 1990 edition appearing in that version of the Syntopicon at all.

I took a quick look at the Syntopicon V1 (1990) via the Internet Archive and of the added texts that year I sampled searches for Voltaire, Erasmus, and John Calvin and the only appearances of them to be found are in the Addition Bibliography sections which is also where they appeared in the 1952 editions. My small sampling/search found no added references of any of these three to the primary portions of the main References sections, so they obviously didn't do the additional editorial work to find and insert those.

As a result, it appears that the 1952 (and reprint editions following it) have a measurably better and more valuable version of the Syntopicon. The 1990 (2nd Edition) is a watered down and less useful version of the original. It is definitely not the dramatically improved version one might have hoped for given the intervening 38 years.

Is it really incumbent on the author to translate every word he's using with respect to the language in which he's writing. He's already doing us a service by translating the Hebrew. Are modern readers somehow with out a dictionary? I might believe they've not been classically educated to capture all the allusions, but the dictionary portion is a simple fix that is difficult to call him out on from a critical perspective, especially in a publication like "Law & Liberty" whose audience is specifically the liberally educated!?!

Our Journey, Day 83 by Dan Allosso

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/our-journey-day-68

A stark statement that lays bare the original sin of Western thought.

The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education. 27th Printing. Vol. 1. 54 vols. The Great Books of the Western World. 1952. Reprint, Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1984.

I read the first edition.

Hutchins, Robert M. The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education. Edited by Robert M. Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler. 1st ed. Vol. 1. 54 vols. Great Books of the Western World. Chicago, IL: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

urn:x-pdf:0ce8391ed9f9f1cfc78c28b6c923abac<br /> Annotation search: https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?user=chrisaldrich&max=100&exactTagSearch=true&expanded=true&addQuoteContext=true&url=urn%3Ax-pdf%3A0ce8391ed9f9f1cfc78c28b6c923abac

Wills, Garry. “After 54 Great Books, 102 Great Ideas, Now—Count Them !—Three Revolutions.” The New York Times, June 13, 1971, sec. BR. https://www.nytimes.com/1971/06/13/archives/the-common-sense-of-politics-by-mortimer-j-adler-265-pp-new-york.html

It's not super obvious from the digitized context (text), but this review is in relation to The Common Sense of Politics (1971) by Mortimer J. Adler.

Wills criticizes Adler and his take in the book as well as the general enterprise of the Great Books of the Western World.

There seem to be interesting sparks here in the turn of the Republican party in the early 70s moving into the coming Reagan era.

Compare this list to what ultimately became the Great Books of the Western World in 1952. Lots more 20th century writing on it to begin...

This book was published originally in 1940 and apparently the Great Books of the Western World was hatched in 1943, so this book isn't necessarily a stepping stone to pitching/selling those, though obviously it informs the ideas which led up to its creation.

Note that it is roughly contemporaneous to his article a year later:

Adler, Mortimer J. “How to Mark a Book.” Saturday Review of Literature, July 6, 1941.<br /> https://stevenson.ucsc.edu/academics/stevenson-college-core-courses/how-to-mark-a-book-1.pdf

Hutchins indicates that part of the fall of the humanities was the result of the rise of the scientific method and experimental science. In wanting fields from the humanities—like social sciences and history—to be a part of this new scientific paradigm, professors completely reframed their paradigms in a more scientific mode and thereby erased the progenitors and ideas in these fields for newer material which replaced the old which was now viewed as "less than" in the new paradigms. This same sort of erasure of Indigenous knowledges was also similarly effected as they were also seen as "less than" from the perspective of the new scientific regime.

One might also suggest that some of it was the result of the acceleration of life brought on by the invention of writing, literacy, and the spread of the printing press making for larger swaths of knowledge to be more immediately available.

Purpose of the Great Books of the Western World

Barzun, Jacques. “The Great Books.” The Atlantic, December 1952. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1952/12/the-great-books/642341/.

Barzun heaps praise on Great Books of the Western World with some criticism of what it is also missing. He finds more than a few superlative words for the majesty of the Syntopicon.

According to Jacques Barzun (and possibly written in the volumes itself), while the Syntopicon has 102 ideas, there are "some three thousand subheadings."

the five-foot shelf reference is to the Harvard Classics competitor

I like their simplicity and cloth texture, but family members seem to think that my 1952 set of The Great Books of the Western World are a bit on the "dreary looking side" compared with the more colorful books in our home library. (It says something that the 12 year old thinks my yellow Springer graduate math texts are more inviting...) Has anyone else had this problem and solved it with custom printed dust jackets?

• Has anyone seen them for sale?
• Made their own?
• Interested in commissioning some as a bigger group?
• Used a third-party company to design and print something?

In doing something like this for fun, I might hope that the younger kids in the house might show more interest in some more lively/colorful custom covers.

I'm partially tempted to use a classical painting as a display across the spines (a la Juniper Books collections) perhaps using:

• The School of Athens by Raphael
• The Death of Socrates by Jacques-Louis David

Other thoughts? suggestions?

Syndication link: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClassicalEducation/comments/15gv2cz/custom_dust_jackets_for_the_great_books_of_the/

There are 443 works by 74 authors in the Great Books of the Western World. All of them are printed in their entirety except for Aquinas, Kepler and Fourier.

Robert Hutchins takes sole responsibility for the final decision on the selection for the books which appear in The Great Books of the Western World series.

One wonders what sort of advice he may have sought out or received with respect to a much broader diversity of topics and writers with respect to his own time. I reminded a bit of the article The 102 Great Ideas (Life, 1948) which highlights a more progressive stance with respect to women and feminism in the examples used.

See: LIFE. “The 102 Great Ideas: Scholars Complete a Monumental Catalog.” January 26, 1948. Https://books.google.com/books?id=p0gEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA92&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false. Google Books.

It feels odd that people wouldn't understand their own traditions, but it obviously happens. Information overload can obviously heavily afflict societies toward forgetting their traditions and the formation of new traditions, particularly in non-oral traditions which focus more on written texts which can more easily be ignored (not read) and then later replaced with seemingly newer traditions.

Take for example the resurgence of note taking ideas circa 2014-2020 which completely disregarded the prior histories, particularly in lieu of new technologies for doing them.

As a means of focusing on Western Culture, the editors here have highlighted some of the most important thoughts for encapsulating and influencing their current and future cultures.

How do oral traditions embrace the idea of the "Great Conversation"?

Two of the driving reasons behind the Great Books project were improvement of both education and democracy.

The democracy portion was likely prompted by the second Red Scare from ~1947-1957 which had profound effects on America. Published in 1952, this series would have considered it closely and it's interesting they included Marx in the thinkers at the end of the series.

A great admission to make upfront in such a massive endeavor which one hopes to shape the future.

What does this mean for ars excerpendi writ large? Particularly when it may apply to hundreds of thousands?

Hutchins, Robert M., Mortimer J. Adler, and William Gorman, eds. The Great Ideas: A Syntopicon of Great Books of the Western World, Volume II, Man to World. 1st ed. Vol. 3. 54 vols. The Great Books of the Western World. Chicago, IL: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

Hutchins, Robert M., Mortimer J. Adler, and William Gorman, eds. The Great Ideas: A Syntopicon of Great Books of the Western World, Volume I, Angel to Love. 1st ed. Vol. 2. 54 vols. Great Books of the Western World. Chicago, IL: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

LIFE. “The 102 Great Ideas: Scholars Complete a Monumental Catalog.” January 26, 1948. https://books.google.com/books?id=p0gEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA92&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false. Google Books.

Provides an small example of "the great conversation" on the equality of men and women.

Amidst a number of very gendered advertisements in issue 4 of volume 24 of LIFE magazine from 1948 is a short piece on the pending release of The Encyclopædia Britannica's Great Books of the Western World.

The piece starts out talking about the 432 classical works written by 71 men and highlights the fact that "Woman, not a main idea, is included [with] in [the topical category] Family Man and Love." The piece goes on by way of example of the work to excerpt portions on Idea number 51: "Man". To show the flexibility of the included Syntopicon categorization they elaborate with 15 excerpted passages from authors from Plato to Freud on Idea 51, subdivision 6b: "Men and Women: their equality or inequality".

It provides a fantastic mini-study on the emerging conversation on gender studies as seen in a mainstream magazine in 1948.

Were there any follow up letters to the editor on this topic in subsequent issues? How was this broader piece received with respect to the idea of gender at the time?

A staff of at least 26 created the underlying index that would lay at the heart of the Great Books of the Western World which was prepared in a rented old fraternity house on the University of Chicago campus. (p. 93)

How did Michael Oakeshott's philosophy overlap with the idea of the 'Great Conversation' or 20th century movement of Adler's Great Books of the Western World.

How does it influence the idea of "having conversations with the text" in the annotation space?

The AdlerNet Guide, Part III<br /> by Amy Hunt

https://archive.org/details/encyclopaediabritannicagreatbooksofthewesternworld/Encyclop%C3%A6dia%20Britannica%20-%20Great%20Books%20of%20the%20Western%20World%2C%20Volume%201%20-%20The%20Great%20Conversation/

Lubbock's List: http://www.greaterbooks.com/lubbock.html

http://www.greaterbooks.com/

Center for the Study of the Great Ideas

https://web.archive.org/web/20190806154724/https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/l/literature/gbww/index.html

University of Adelaide digital collection of the Great Books of the Western World using public domain sources within their collection.

https://www.logos.com/product/55052/great-books-of-the-western-world

A digital (app?) version of The Great Books of the Western World with cross references.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ebooks/comments/eao9c8/great_books_of_the_western_world_ebook_collection/

Someone's collected digital copies of most of the Great Books of the Western World collection here.

https://standardebooks.org/collections/encyclopaedia-britannicas-great-books-of-the-western-world

the phrase "intellectual furniture" is sort of painful here...

1952, 1970s, 1980s editions and their differences.

https://press.princeton.edu/series/ancient-wisdom-for-modern-readers

This appears like Princeton University Press is publishing sections of someone's commonplace books as stand alone issues per heading where each chapter has a one or more selections (in the original language with new translations).

This almost feels like a version of The Great Books of the Western World watered down for a modern audience?

https://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-nonfiction/

What a solid looking list of non-fiction books.

http://www.greyroom.org/issues/60/20/the-dialectic-of-the-university-his-masters-voice/

“The Indexers pose with the file of Great Ideas. At sides stand editors [Mortimer] Adler (left) and [William] Gorman (right). Each file drawer contains index references to a Great Idea. In center are the works of the 71 authors which constitute the Great Books.” From “The 102 Great Ideas: Scholars Complete a Monumental Catalog,” Life 24, no. 4 (26 January 1948). Photo: George Skadding.

Photos from

"The 102 Great Ideas: Scholars Complete a Monumental Catalog," Life, 26 January 1948, 92–3.

https://occidental.substack.com/p/the-adlernet-guide-part-ii?sd=pf

Description of a note taking method for reading the Great Books: part commonplace, part zettelkasten.

I'm curious where she's ultimately placing the cards to know if the color coding means anything in the end other than simply differentiating the card "types" up front? (i.e. does it help to distinguish cards once potentially mixed up?)

http://www.nationalgreatbooks.com/cirriculum/background.html

Louis Menand had an interesting article on great books courses recently: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/20/whats-so-great-about-great-books-courses-roosevelt-montas-rescuing-socrates.

If you look closely at those photos of Adler, you'll notice that one is in context and the other is the same image of him cut and pasted onto a set of books.

Those who are into this broader topic may also appreciate Alex Beam's book "A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books". A while back I remember going though Lawrence Principe's Great Courses lecture series on the History of Science to 1700 which I suspect might help contextualize a tour through the great courses.

I'm curious if you're adding any other books that Adler et al left off their list?

https://github.com/sajjad2881/NewSyntopicon

Someone's creating a new digitally linked version of the Syntopicon as text files for Obsidian (and potentially other platforms). Looks like it's partial at best and will need a lot of editing work to become whole.

found by way of

Has anyone made a hypermedia rendition of the Syntopicon, i.e. with transcluded windows or "parallel pages" into the indexed texts?<br><br>Many of Adler's Great Books are public domain, so it wouldn't require *so* titanic a copyright issue… pic.twitter.com/UmWiyn5aBC

— Andy Matuschak (@andy_matuschak) August 17, 2022

https://occidental.substack.com/p/my-adler-antinet

Cross posted at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/wromeb/the_antinet_as_an_aid_to_analytical_reading_a_la/<br /> with additional commentary.

Research by Britannica (source?) indicated that the Great Books of the Western World sold well but were not often read.

Link to: A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking Owen Gingerich Copernicus

Are some of the classic texts better than more advanced digested texts because they form the building blocks of our thought and society?

Are we training thinkers or doers?

Though if we roughly estimate this collection at 1000 cards per box with roughly 76 boxes potentially present, the 76,000 cards are still shy of Luhmann's collection. It'll take some hunting thigs down, but as Adler suggests that people write their notes in their books, which he would have likely done, then this collection isn't necessarily his own. I suspect, but don't yet have definitive proof, that it was created as a group effort for the 54-volume Great Books of the Western World and its two-volume index of great ideas, the Syntopicon.

Published in 1941, this article precedes the beginning of the project of publishing the Great Books of the Western World for Encyclopedia Britannica, so Adler isn't just writing this from a marketing perspective.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/20/whats-so-great-about-great-books-courses-roosevelt-montas-rescuing-socrates

The format of many "great books" courses is to help students relate the texts to their own lives, not to have a better understanding of the books or to hone methods of interpreting them.

This isn't too dissimilar to the way that many Protestants are taught to apply the Bible to their daily lives.

Are students mis-applying the great books because they don't understand their original ideas and context the way many religious people do with the Bible?

Brief history of the "great books".

This passage reminds me of a conversation on 2021-11-16 at Liquid Margins with Will T. Monroe (@willtmonroe) about using Sönke Ahrens' book Smart Notes and Hypothes.is as a structure for getting groups of people (compared to Ahrens' focus on a single person) to do collection, curation, and creation of open education resources (OER).

Here Jeffrey Todd Knight sounds like he's looking at it from the perspective of one (or maybe two) creators in conjunction (curator and binder/publisher) while I'm thinking about expanding behond

This sort of pattern can also be seen in Mortimer J. Adler's group zettelkasten used to create The Great Books of the Western World series as well in larger wiki-based efforts like Wikipedia, so it's not new, but the question is how a teacher (or other leader) can help to better organize a community of creators around making larger works from smaller pieces. Robin DeRosa's example of using OER in the classroom is another example, but there, the process sounded much more difficult and manual.

This is the sort of piece that Vannevar Bush completely missed as a mode of creation and research in his conceptualization of the Memex. Perhaps we need the "Inventiex" as a mode of larger group means of "inventio" using these methods in a digital setting?

Book review (and cultural commentary) on Alex Beam's A Great Idea at the Time, (Public Affairs, 2008).

what a lovely sentence

How does one keep the spirit of these older books alive? Is it only by subsuming into and expanding upon a larger body of common knowledge?

What do they still have to teach us?

Just the title "A Great Idea at the Time" makes me wonder if this project didn't help speed along the creation of the dullness of the humanities and thereby attempt to kill it?

What might they have done differently to better highlight the joy and fun of these works to have better encouraged it.

Too often reformers reform all the joy out of things.