Aristotle for Everybody: Mortimer J. Adler Makes Difficult Thought Easy
In the fourth century BC, Aristotle thought about our lives and our world. In Aristotle for Everybody (1978), the American philosopher Mortimer J. Adler shows how that thinking can still help us today, in plain language and without any academic apparatus.
Author: Mortimer J. Adler (1902–2001)
Title: Aristotle for Everybody: Difficult Thought Made Easy (1978)
Format: English paperback (Touchstone), 224 pages
Scope: A plain-language introduction to Aristotle’s ideas for general readers
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/0684838230 (ASIN 0684838230)
What Aristotle Can Help You Understand
According to Adler, Aristotle’s thought can help you understand:
- The difference between your wants and your needs.
- How to pursue happiness.
- The right plan for a good life.
- Love and justice.
- The true, the good and the beautiful.
- Infinity, eternity and God.
Simple but Deep
The simplicity and clarity of this little book are amazing. Despite its simplicity, it helps answer some of the deepest questions humankind has ever asked itself and still keeps asking. Adler presents Aristotle’s ’uncommon common sense’ in a lucid, everyday way, and encourages readers to think philosophically for themselves.
Maker, Doer, Knower
Adler organises the book around the main ways human beings engage with the world. After a section on "man the philosophical animal", he discusses man the maker, which covers Aristotle’s ideas about art, production and causes; man the doer, his ethics and politics; and man the knower, his logic and theory of knowledge. Each part uses everyday examples, a carpenter making a table, a person deciding how to spend their life, to show that Aristotle was systematising common sense rather than inventing abstractions.
Real Goods and Apparent Goods
One of the most useful chapters distinguishes between needs, natural desires that everyone shares, such as health, knowledge and friendship, and wants, acquired desires that differ from person to person. What satisfies a need is a real good; what merely satisfies a want may be only an apparent good. Happiness, for Aristotle as Adler reads him, is not a feeling but a whole life well lived, made up of the real goods acquired in the right order and through good habits, the virtues.
Who Was Adler?
Mortimer J. Adler (1902–2001) was a philosopher and educator who spent much of his career making the classics accessible. With Robert Maynard Hutchins at the University of Chicago he championed the Great Books programme, and he was associate editor of the Great Books of the Western World published by Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1952. His best-known book is How to Read a Book (1940), still in print.
About Aristotle
Aristotle studied for twenty years in Plato’s Academy, tutored the young Alexander the Great and founded his own school in Athens, the Lyceum. His works range from biology and physics to ethics, politics, rhetoric and poetry. Adler’s book is a doorway; the natural next step is the Nicomachean Ethics itself, which readers will find far less forbidding after this introduction.
How to Read It
The chapters are short, and each builds on the last, so it is best read in order and slowly, a chapter at a time, perhaps with a notebook. Adler often asks readers to test an idea against their own experience before moving on, and the book works best when they do. Students preparing for philosophy at school or university will find it a painless foundation, and adults who never studied philosophy will discover that they have been reasoning like Aristotle for years without knowing it.
Why It Still Applies
Aristotle (384–322 BC) lived nearly two and a half thousand years ago, but his teachings still apply because they deal with human nature as a whole, something that has not really changed in all that time. This is a must-read, and it should be in the library of anyone who likes to think philosophically.
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