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.

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

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