Adler, Mortimer J. 1940. “How to Mark a Book.” Saturday Review of Literature 6: 250–52. https://www.unz.com/print/SaturdayRev-1940jul06-00011/ (January 11, 2023).

Annotations: https://via.hypothes.is/https://docdrop.org/download_annotation_doc/Adler---1940---How-to-Mark-a-Book-fehef.pdf

Annotations alternate: https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?user=chrisaldrich&max=100&exactTagSearch=true&expanded=true&url=https%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fdownload_annotation_doc%2FAdler---1940---How-to-Mark-a-Book-fehef.pdf

Prior [.pdf copy]9https://stevenson.ucsc.edu/academics/stevenson-college-core-courses/how-to-mark-a-book-1.pdf): - Annotations https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=url%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fstevenson.ucsc.edu%2Facademics%2Fstevenson-college-core-courses%2Fhow-to-mark-a-book-1.pdf<br /> - Alternate annotation link https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?user=chrisaldrich&max=100&exactTagSearch=true&expanded=true&url=https%3A%2F%2Fstevenson.ucsc.edu%2Facademics%2Fstevenson-college-core-courses%2Fhow-to-mark-a-book-1.pdf

Summary

• Marking a book helps in increasing "the most efficient kind of reading."
• The marked (pun intended) difference between physical vs. intellectual ownership of books
• 3 types of book owners:
  • 1. collector of wood pulp and ink
  • 1. one whose read most and dipped into some
  • 1. one who's annotated and sucked the marrow out of them
• Active reading (annotating and staying awake) and engaging deeply, arguing with, and questioning the author is the point of reading.
• A historical record of your active reading allows you to continue the conversation you've had with the author and yourself. (p12)
• Adler's method of reading and marking:
  1. Underlining major points of importance
  2. Vertical lines for emphasis
  3. Marginal marks (stars, asterisks, etc.) (10-20 per book) to indicate the most important statements in conjunction with dogearing these pages for making it easier to find them subsequently
  4. Numbers in the margin to sequence arguments
  5. Page numbers in the margin for linking ideas across pages, ostensibly for juxtaposing them later
  6. Circling key words or phrases (unsaid here, but this is helpful for indexing as well as helping one to come to terms with the author)
  7. Marginal writing for synopsis of sections as well as questions raised by the text; use of endpapers for a personal index of ideas presented chronologically throughout the book
• Objections to marking books:
  • Using scratch pad (or index cards, which he doesn't mention specifically, but which could be implied) so as not to destroy a precious or rare physical copy (this is a repetition from earlier in the article)
  • Marking slows you down. This is part of the point! Slowing down makes you engage with the author and get more out of the text.
  • You can't loan books because they contain your important thoughts which you don't want to give away (and lose the historical record of your thinking). Solution: Simply require friends to buy their own copy.

Adler creates a very specific and subtle definition of ownership as it applies to books.

It's not too dissimilar to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's idea of ownership or love of people. "Unique to me in all the world"

https://www.maggiedelano.com/garden/syntopical-reading-in-roam by Maggie Delano

Born, Daniel. “Utopian Civic-Mindedness: Robert Maynard Hutchins, Mortimer Adler, and the Great Books Enterprise.” In Reading Communities from Salons to Cyberspace, edited by DeNel Rehberg Sedo, 81–100. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2011. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230308848_5.

St. John's College had a solid great books program in large part because of Buchanan and his relationship with Adler.

visitors of Adler & Hutchins' great books seminars

Daniel Born places Oprah and her book club into the tradition of Adler & Hutchins' The Great Books of the Western World.

A young man named Marshall McLuhan, having glimpsed the photo shoot in Life, wrote with scathing insight in his first book, The Mechanical Bride (1951):

The services of Dr. Hutchins and Professor Adler to education are justly celebrated. They have by their enthusiasm put education in

McLuhan analogizes the tabbed dividers of a card index to tombstones and the card indexes to coffins!

link to: https://hypothes.is/a/RB4YdNUQEe2NLDvcEZtdKw

Perhaps I need to argue more with the authors and the content, as Adler & van Doren also recommend.

This might be a limitation in (the way I do) Zettelkasten. Because I am not writing in the margins and not engage in "tearing up" the book, I am less inclined to argue against/with the work.

Maybe I need to do this more using bib-card. Further thought on implementation necessary...

Perhaps a different reason is that I like to get through most books quickly rather than slowly. Sometimes I do the arguing afterward, within my ZK.

I need to reflect on this at some point (in the near future) and optimize my processes.

Is this a criticism by Luhmann on the conventional notion of syntopical reading in Adlerian terms? Probably without knowing Adler's work.

Because science/truth work (knowledge) is constantly in revision, conventional syntopical reading on a topic of science is without necessary value?

Perhaps unless stored and expanded upon in a ZK?

Further thought is required to disseminate this paragraph.

One must read analytically (cf Adler & van Doren) in order to grasp the meaning behind text. Or perhaps syntopically by default if one performs the Zettelkasten method.

Conventional Syntopical Reading is "immediate" and project-based, at least in Adlerian terms, that is.

However, when doing Zettelkasten work, one is perpetually reading syntopically and therefore I would call it Delayed Syntopical Reading

( ~8:00 )

This explanation of why to read books in a certain order in dependency of each other is analogous to why a Zettelkasten (in Luhmannian sense) cannot be used collaboratively.

In order for someone else to understand your notes (not meant to be published), they would have to understand both the source text you are referencing and the implicit references you make. Things you understand instinctively and do not need to write down.

Because others do not have your experiences and worldview, it is more difficult for them, perhaps impossible, to completely comprehend your Zettels, your notes.

( ~5:00 ) Reading Aids should be used after initial interpretation. This is to prevent framing bias.

( ~ 6:25-end )

Steps for designing a reading plan/list: 1. Pick a topic/goal (or question you want to answer) & how long you want to take to achieve this. 2. Do research into the books necessary to achieve this goal. Meta-learning, scope out the subject. The number of books is relative to the goal and length of the goal. 3. Find the books using different tools such as Google & GoodReads & YouTube Recommendations (ChatGPT & Gemini are also useful). 4. Refine the book list (go through reviews, etc., in Adlerian steps, do an Inspectional Read of everything... Find out if it's truly useful). Also order them into a useful sequence for the syntopical reading project. Highlight the topics covered, how difficult they are, relevancy, etc. 5. Order the books (or download them)

Reminds me a bit of Scott Young's Metalearning step, and doing a skill decomposition in van Merriënboer et al.'s 10 Steps to Complex Learning

( ~ 10:20)

Kathleen recommends as part of an inspectional reading to find out who the author is. This is valuable and I believe not something Adler & van Doren mentioned in their book.

Knowing who the author is gives more context to the book and potentially some information about credibility.

Will implement this.

(~5:40)

It appears she put some sticky notes at important points/structure references while reading inspectionally...

Does this not take too much effort/time for an inspectional read a la Adler?

First, a man should not have any power over that which he does not understand (deeply).

Second, patience as a virtue is very important here, because developing expertise in an area takes time and effort. One must be devoted.

Following from this manner comes, once again, Charlie Munger's principle... Do not form an opinion if you do not understand multiple perspectives.

"Yes, but I don't have the time to do my own research." is criticism on this principle, I respond with: "But if you aren't even willing to make time to form your opinion based on logic and deep understanding, is it worth having an opinion at all?"

Like Marcus Aurelius said: "The opinion of ten thousand men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject."

You don't ask a lawyer to perform surgery on you, or even to explain it to you theoretically, he does not know anything about this. In the same way, a civilian should not be asked to teach politics.

From the same manner, do not judge before understanding. This is also what Mortimer J. Adler & Charles van Doren advocate: "You must say with reasonable certainty 'I understand' before you can say any of the following: 'I agree,' 'I disagree,' or 'I suspend judgement.'"

available at: https://www.unz.com/print/SaturdayRev-1940mar09-00006/

Barzun, Jacques. "Read, Do Not Run" Review of How to Read a Book, by Mortimer J. Adler. The Saturday Review, March 9, 1940.

Contact Schreyer about existence of archived version of Syntopicon...

Jacques Barzun wrote a review of of the Great Books when they came out in 1952.

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

See notes at: https://hypothes.is/a/8o-z3DHLEe6_PMtDOvwCmg

did the tension inherent in the cultural evolution of the great books idea versus vocational and other forms of education set up the culture wars of the late 1900s/early 2000s?

Interesting. Using Mortimer J. Adler's concept of Syntopical Reading to produce motivation, in a good way, for diving into books.

Language is essential for the expression of thought, be it novel or ancient.

The complexity of the topic is determined by the content of the discussion the topic is about.

To me, it seems that Adler et al., are arguing that a topic should be stated as a phrase with varying degrees of complexity, determined by ?

Some examples of topics that are formulated and used in the original syntopicon.

A topic should never be suggestive, for it would not be a topic in that way.

A topic is a place where minds meet for discussion.

It seems as though an idea is very broad and a "sub-topic" is more granular, though also determined based on the overall content and related to the primary idea.

It seems that most of the ideas were chosen based on scope and significance.

Adler et al. operated from a state of efficiency in the sense that they did not want the book to become too long (even though, or maybe because of, the fact that the end result became already two volumes each more than a thousand pages)

Adler explains the distinctive factor determining which authors and works were included in the list of the Great Books of the Western World.

Basically, they were works that were influential, written excellently, and had applicability to a considerable amount of ideas processed by the whole.

The ideas were chosen on the basis of coverage within the Great Works.

(~3:00) Syntopical Reading requires building a map of the topic across sources (coming up with one's own terms) in order to find out what each author is saying.

How does one do this if the process of syntopical reading is the process by which one comes up with the knowledge? I believe the answer lies in a high skill level of Inspectional Reading

Obviously, one cannot make a perfect map from the get go, and this should not be the intention (defeat perfectionism)... However, a rough sketch or map is far more valuable than none at all.

I believe this is also the point of Dr. Justin Sung's prestudy... Building the barebone structure of the mindmap, finding the logic behind it all; the first layer.

Lacy, Tim. The Dream of a Democratic Culture: Mortimer J. Adler and the Great Books Idea. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. https://amzn.to/3R2rCox.

(~6:30)

I think the major point here is that Adler points out our minds, and thus our thinking, changes over time. Therefore, when a book is read at a later point in time, our notes are different.

Perhaps his argument to "think again as to make the thought more current" is antithetical to Luhmann's Zettelkasten, which principles upon continuing previous lines of thought, even decades later.

(future note, about half an hour later)... I think in the Zettelkasten the problem is dealt with adequately, since you actually can make new notes expressing why your thought changes... So in this sense it is even more expanded upon the point that Adler makes even though at first sight it seems the complete opposite.

(~8.55)

It is argued by Mortimer Adler and Charles van Doren that to fully grasp a book (part of analytical reading), one should make their own analytical table of contents, outlining not just the chapters but also the content. I need to look into how to make those.

"The great books are the inexhaustible books. The books that can sustain a lifetime of reading."

What did not stand out to me before while reading the book, but does now when watching this, is the fact that the greatest books are subjective to each individual... Meaning my list might not be the same for others.

Very fascinating thought experiment. Out of the 140+ books I have read so far only a few, less than a handful, would fit the list of "growth" books; the greatest, that I would take to the deserted island for 10 years...

1. The Bible
2. Antonin Sertillanges' The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Method, Conditions
3. Marcus Aurelius' Meditations

No other book, to my mind, that I have read so far would cut it to my list.

As Luhmann would say, it is foolish to think that things are black and white; in most scenarios there is nuance... So too is it with reading speed, it must be relative or else it is not accurate. Even speed within books can differ.

I will start doing this too, but on the associated bib-card.

I might actually use a system similar to this myself to aid with the dissection of a book in its fullest; to keep track of arguments and points, I am in need of this. Combine the bib-card with the Marginalia to enhance my reading process.

This is the entire point of an Antinet or Zettelkasten, and it is far more advanced/useful for this purpose than just Marginalia. Sorry Adler, but you should have spoken to Luhmann in this regard. Both of you are heroes of mine, but in this round, Luhmann takes the crown.

I need to do this more often myself. Too often, at least when reading physical books, I am doing the thinking in my head instead of writing on my bib-card what I actually think.

I agree on these three points, which I usually do through the bib-card method or annotating on hypothes.is if I read digitally. I keep the physical book mostly clean.

However, I am looking for a way to keep track of points and arguments in works, and I hypothesize that marginalia are the way to do this the best.

Apparently, the real ownership of a book, to make it a part of oneself, you need to mark it up. To make use of marginalia, according to Adler that is.

I personally don't like Marginalia, as I want to keep my books clean, which is why I use Luhmann's bibliography card method, but perhaps Adler can convince me of the opposite. We shall see.

Adler makes a valid point here, books in its own have no worth. Owning a book, or even having "read" it don't serve any purpose. One must read properly in order to this, analytically or syntopically as Adler would call it.

What he is wrong at, in my opinion, that Marginalia are the key to doing this... Yes, they might be helpful, but other techniques, such as Luhmann's bib-card method and learning methodologies like GRINDEmapping could perhaps be even more useful for this purpose.

Adler, Mortimer J. “How to Mark a Book.” Saturday Review of Literature, July 6, 1940.

See also: https://hypothes.is/a/WZWWgnV2EeyFFBshJKbM4A

ownership [of a book]

BBC Archive - #OnThisDay 1974: Mortimer J. Adler tried to flog Christopher Rainbow the new 15th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.<br /> https://archive.org/details/twitter-1085501921207627776

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

How to Read a Book. Los Angeles: KCET Los Angeles, 1975. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_rizr8bb0c.

13 part series including:<br /> - 01:33:02 Part 8: How to read Stories - 01:46:13 Part 9: What Makes a Story Good - 01:59:24 Part 10 How to Read a Poem - Shakespeare sonnet 116, "admit" definition - Wordsworth poem about London and nature - 02:12:49 Part 11: Activating Poetry and Plays - 02:26:09 Part 12: How to Read Two Books at the Same Time - 02:39:29 Part 13: The Pyramid of Books

2023-11-29: Since the original video was removed, one can also view the series at: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPajsb520dyzNw9mHsZnrzi5w9N_amS7E

Mortimer Adler's name is an anagram of "Mr. Read More Lit".

via Richard Carter at https://boffosocko.com/2023/11/14/55819838/#comment-422743

How to Read (and Understand) Hard Books<br /> Jared Henderson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laXcJyx9xCc

A short overview of Adler and Van Doren's How to Read a Book

Not bad, though Henderson accidentally reads "syntopical" as "synoptical".

http://richardcarter.com/sidelines/a-good-reason-not-to-write-in-books/

That book annotating monster Adler indicated that if he read books second and subsequent times that he would generally purchase a new copy and mark it up afresh. Doublemonster!

See: How to Read a Book. Los Angeles: KCET Los Angeles, 1975. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_rizr8bb0c. It was one of the later episodes as I recall.

Some of the missing piece here is knowing a method for extracting and subsequently building. Without the recipe in hand, it's difficult to bake a complex cake.

Not mentioned here as something which may be missing, but which Adler & Van Doren identify as strength and ability to read at multiple levels including inspectionally, analytically, and ultimately syntopically.

To some extent, the knowledge of the method for excerpting and arranging will ultimately allow the interested lifelong learner the ability to read syntopically even if it isn't the sort of targeted exercise it might be within creating a thesis.

Amen!

Solitary reading [is] was almost as much a vice as solitary drinking. —Mortimer J. Adler, in Part 11: Activating Poetry and Plays

Annotations at: https://docdrop.org/video/Y_rizr8bb0c/

Mortimer Adler gave oral examinations at St. Johns in which he would often ask a student to restate the ideas of writers in their own words and then ask for a concrete example of that idea. Being able to do these two things is a solid way of indicating that one fully understands an idea.

Adler and Van Doren querying each other demonstrate this once or twice in the video.

related: - https://hypothes.is/a/rh1M5vdEEeut4pOOF7OYNA - https://hypothes.is/a/iV5MwjivEe23zyebtBagfw

Where does this method sit with respect to the Feynman Technique? Does this appear in the 1940 edition of Adler's book and thus predate it all?

Adler, Mortimer J., and Charles Van Doren. How to Read a Book. Revised and Updated edition. 1940. Reprint, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972.

Progress

• Started reading on 2021-07-28 at 1:26 PM
• Read through chapter 6 on 2022-11-06 at 1:40 PM

Annotation URL: urn:x-pdf:47749dd5c860ea4a9b8749ab77a009da<br /> Annotation search

Jack Kerouac followed the general advice of Mortimer J. Adler to write notes into the endpapers of his books as evidenced by the endpapers of Volume IV of the 7th Year Course of The Great Books Foundation series with which Adler was closely associated.

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.

How does the general idea of zeitgeist of the early 70's relate to the idea of "revolution"?

See also: Gil Scott-Heron's "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" (1970)

Is the cohesive nature of Hutchins and Adler's enterprise for the humanities and the Great Conversation, part of the kernel of the rise of interdisciplinarity seen in the early 2000s onward in academia (and possibly industry).

Certainly large portions are the result of uber-specialization, particularly in spaces which have concatenated and have allowed people to specialize in multiple areas to create new combinatorial creative possibilities.

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.

reply to u/TheVoroscope at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/va2s09/comment/jtwqhd7/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

u/TheVoroscope, the only things I've seen on it are the original and what you've written. I suspect anything current will be quite niche and would require searching in the areas of academic journal articles or at the level of graduate studies within the library sciences where you might find something. Simon Winchester had a section on the rise and downfall of the Encyclopedia Britannica in his most recent book Knowing What We Know (2023) which has a brief mention of the Propædia, but it was broadly described as a $32 million dollar bomb that ended the Encyclopedia. I would suspect that the last printings in 2010 and 2012 were probably the last more as a result of the rise of internet usage than they were the form and function of the Propædia itself though.

Robert Hutchins, former dean of Yale Law School (1927–1929), president (1929–1945) and chancellor (1945–1951) of the University of Chicago, closes his preface to his grand project with Mortimer J. Adler by giving pride of place to Adler's Syntopicon. It touches on the unreasonable value of building and maintaining a zettelkasten:

But I would do less than justice to Mr. Adler's achievement if I left the matter there. The Syntopicon is, in addition to all this, and in addition to being a monument to the industry, devotion, and intelligence of Mr. Adler and his staff, a step forward in the thought of the West. It indicates where we are: where the agreements and disagreements lie; where the problems are; where the work has to be done. It thus helps to keep us from wasting our time through misunderstanding and points to the issues that must be attacked. When the history of the intellectual life of this century is written, the Syntopicon will be regarded as one of the landmarks in it. —Robert M. Hutchins, p xxvi The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education. 1952.

Adler's Syntopicon has been briefly discussed in the forum.zettelkasten.de space before. However it isn't just an index compiled into two books which were volumes 2 and 3 of The Great Books of the Western World, it's physically a topically indexed card index or a grand zettelkasten surveying Western culture. Its value to readers and users is immeasurable and it stands as a fascinating example of what a well-constructed card index might allow one to do even when they don't have their own yet. For those who have only seen the Syntopicon in book form, you might better appreciate pictures of it in slipbox form prior to being published as two books covering 2,428 pages:

Two page spread of Life Magazine article with the title "The 102 Great Ideas" featuring a photo of 26 people behind 102 card index boxes with categorized topical labels from "Angel" to "Will".

Mortimer J. Adler holding a pipe in his left hand and mouth posing in front of dozens of boxes of index cards with topic headwords including "law", "love", "life", "sin", "art", "democracy", "citizen", "fate", etc.

Adler spoke of practicing syntopical reading, but anyone who compiles their own card index (in either analog or digital form) will realize the ultimate value in creating their own syntopical writing or what Robert Hutchins calls participating in "The Great Conversation" across twenty-five centuries of documented human communication. Adler's version may not have had the internal structure of Luhmann's zettelkasten, but it definitely served similar sorts of purposes for those who worked on it and published from it.

References

• 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.
• 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.

syndication link: https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2623/mortimer-j-adlers-syntopicon-a-topically-arranged-collaborative-slipbox/

p xxvi

Hutchins closes his preface to his grand project with Mortimer J. Adler by giving pride of place to Adler's Syntopicon.

Adler's Syntopicon isn't just an index compiled into two books which were volumes 2 and 3 of The Great Books of the Western World, it's physically a topically indexed card index of data (a grand zettelkasten surveying Western culture if you will). It's value to readers and users is immeasurable and it stands as a fascinating example of what a well-constructed card index might allow one to do even when they don't have their own yet.

Adler spoke of practicing syntopical reading, but anyone who compiles their own card index (in either analog or digital form) will realize the ultimate value in creating their own syntopical writing or what Robert Hutchins calls participating in "The Great Conversation" across twenty-five centuries of documented human communication.

See also: https://hypothes.is/a/WF4THtUNEe2dZTdlQCbmXw

The way Hutchins presents the idea of "Adler's achievement" here seems to indicate that Hutchins didn't have a direct hand in compiling or working on it directly.

When will we get the civil disobedience version of Mortimer J. Adler's How to Mark a Book?

Center for the Study of the Great Ideas

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

also:

Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it—which comes to the same thing—is by writing in it. —Adler, Mortimer J., and Charles Van Doren. How to Read a Book. Revised and Updated edition. 1940. Reprint, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972.

They also suggest that due to the relative low cost of books, it's easier to justify writing in them, though they carve out an exception for the barbarism of scribbling in library books.

This broadly applies to both oral and literate societies.

Desire, ability, and need are all tough measures however... each one losing a portion of the population along the way.

How can we maintain high proportions across all these variables?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hill_(historian)

Christopher Hill's practice of creating indices of topics of interest to him in the end papers of his books is similar to that of Mortimer J. Adler who attested this practice as well.

For her online book clubs, Maggie Delano defines four broad types of notes as a template for users to have a common language: - terms - propositions (arguments, claims) - questions - sources (references which support the above three types)

I'm fairly sure in a separate context, I've heard that these were broadly lifted from her reading of Mortimer J. Adler's How to Read a book. (reference? an early session of Dan Allosso's Obsidian Book club?)

These become the backbone of breaking down a book and using them to have a conversation with the author.

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.

Index cards for commonplacing?

I know that Robert Greene and Ryan Holiday have talked about their commonplace methods using index cards before, and Mortimer J. Adler et al. used index cards with commonplacing methods in their Great Books/Syntopicon project, but is anyone else using this method? Where or from whom did you learn/hear about using index cards? What benefits do you feel you're getting over a journal or notebook-based method? Mortimer J. Adler smoking a pipe amidst a sea of index cards in boxes with 102 topic labels (examples: Law, World, Love, Life, Being, Sin, Art, Citizen, Change, etc.)

This sounds similar to the variety of calls to do collaborative card indexes for scientific efforts, particularly those found in the fall of 1899 in the journal Science.

This is also very similar to Mortimer J. Adler et al's group collaboration to produce The Syntopicon as well as his work on Propædia and Encyclopædia Britannica.

link to: https://hypothes.is/a/nvWZnuApEeuKR--5AeBv8w

Deutsch's encyclopedia work here sounds similar to that of Mortimer J. Adler who used a card index in much the same way.

https://thevoroscope.com/2022/06/20/sum-total-human-knowledge-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?)

Highlighted portion is a quote from Kuehn sub-quoting David Lodge, Deaf Sentence (New York: Viking 2008)

Ownership is certainly a factor here, but given how inexpensive many books are now, if you own it, why not mark it up? See also: Mortimer J. Adler's position on this.

Marking up library books is a barbarism; not marking up your own books is a worse sin.

https://occidental.substack.com/p/the-adlernet-guide-for-intelligent

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.

https://medium.com/birds-with-teeth/classical-learnings-unicorn-the-syntopicon-729d5e159aca

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?

Collections of papers for Mortimer J. Adler: - University of Chicago https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/scrc/findingaids/view.php?eadid=ICU.SPCL.ADLERM - https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/ead/rlg/ICU.SPCL.ADLERM.pdf (pdf copy) - Syracuse University https://library.syracuse.edu/digital/guides/a/adler_mj.htm - Harry Ransom Center https://norman.hrc.utexas.edu/fasearch/findingAid.cfm?eadid=00003 - Smithsonian https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/surveys/chicago/university-chicago-library-special-collections-research-center/mortimer

None appear to have details about the card collection used for compiling the encyclopedia or Syntopicon.

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.

See Bacon’s letter to Greville examined by Vernon Snow, ‘Francis Bacon’s Advice to Fulke Greville on Research Techniques’, Huntington Library Quarterly 23 (1960), 369–78, at 374

This is similar in tone but for slightly differing reasons to Mortimer J. Adler recommending against loaning one's annotated books to other users. (see: https://hypothes.is/a/6x75DnXBEeyUyEOjgj_zKg)

How to Mark a Book by Mortimer J. Adler, Ph.D. from The Saturday Review of Literature, July 6, 1941

https://stevenson.ucsc.edu/academics/stevenson-college-core-courses/how-to-mark-a-book-1.pdf

Interesting to note here that he suggests a scratch pad rather than index cards here given his own personal use of index cards.

Mortimer J. Adler's method of annotating a text.

He's primarily giving the author and their ideas all the power and importance here.

There is nothing, so far, about immediate progressive summarization. There's also little about the reuse of one's notes for analysis and future synthesis, which I find surprising.

Earlier in the essay he mentions picking the book up later to refresh one's memory, but there's nothing about linking the ideas from one book to another.

Killjoy!

-Mortimer J. Adler

https://luhmann.surge.sh/learning-how-to-read

Learning How to Read by Niklas Luhmann

Not as dense as Mortimer J. Adler's advice, but differentiates reading technical material versus poetry and novels. Moves to the topic of some of the value of note taking as a means of progressive summarization which may have implications for better remembering material.

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?

Mortimer J. Adler, eat your heart out.

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

This is a painful burn by the writer Alex Beam.

Perhaps worth modifying for Donald J. Trump?

From the perspective of the American experiment and the evolution of democracy, Donald J. Trump was a dead white male who had the bad luck to still be alive."

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.

https://ivankreilkamp.com/2008/11/19/mortimer-adlers-syntopicon/

Adler apparently kept a commonplace book in the form of a massive zettelkasten (and may have kept a more traditional commonplace book as well). I wonder if they detail any note taking details or advice here.

Reminded by Connor of Mortimer Adler's Syntopicon. I'm pretty sure I've got it in my list of encyclopedias growing out of the commonplace book tradition, but... just in case.

If I recall it was compiled using index cards, thus also placing it in the zettelkasten tradition.

(via Almay)

If you’re generalizing Zettelkasten to “All Non-Linear Knowledge Management Strategies” You should include Mortimer Adler and the Syntopicon, and John Locke’s guide to how to set up a commonplace book<br><br>This isn’t a game of calling “dibs”<br><br>it’s about 🧠👶shttps://t.co/sH3JO6d9Jq

— Conor White-Sullivan 𐃏🇸🇻 (@Conaw) July 8, 2021