Toward a Summa

Philosopher Mortimer Adler consistently admitted that the idea was "a sort of megalomania with me": he had long wanted to set up a staff of scholars whose one job would be to discuss and analyze the main issues in the thinking of Western Man. Last week, as he resigned his post as professor of philosophy of law at the University of Chicago, Adler, 49, announced that he was going to San Francisco to head a new Institute for Philosophical Research--the first of its kind in the world.

With $655,000 from the Ford and Old Dominion Foundations, Adler will be assisted by 14 full-time scholars. He also intends to call in such notable consultants as Thomist Jacques Maritain and Yale Metaphysician Paul Weiss. Together these men will pluck one topic at a time from the modern Babel, and at the end of each investigation, publish books on it. Their purpose will not be to offer any pat answers. All they can possibly do, says Adler, is to "try to reach agreement on 1) the questions to be answered, 2) the range of possible answers to the questions, and 3) the order and connection between these questions and answers."

As Adler sees it, the Summa Dialectica must go beyond his Syntopicon of the 102 Great Ideas (TIME, March 17). The Syntopicon merely laid the. groundwork by furnishing a key to the great books of the past. The Dialectica must attempt to treat the great issues (God, Man, Nature, History, Knowledge, Being, etc.) in relation to the present. Each topic may take many years. But eventually, Adler hopes, a great conversation will have begun. It will be a conversation that may never have an end, but if all goes according to plan, men will finally learn at least what the talk should be about.

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