SAN MATEO, Calif. (AP) - Mortimer J. Adler, a high school dropout who went on to become an educational theorist, a father of the Great Books program and the world's highest paid philosopher, died Thursday. He was 98.
As an author and editor, Adler built a publishing and symposium empire on an unlikely foundation: the philosophic system of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas.
That system influenced his work as compiler of the Great Books of the Western World and as editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Earlier, in the 1930s, it was the underlying theme of the educational reforms Adler and his colleagues carried out at the University of Chicago under the leadership of then-president Robert Maynard Hutchins.
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