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The Great Ideas by Mortimer Adler
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This wiki, known as Ideas, was heavily influenced by Mortimer Adler's book "The Great ideas", which reproduces 102 essays of the great ideas from Adler's earlier work known as the Syntopican, a monumental scholastic endeavor unmatched by anyone. The Syntopican is two volume set that includes the 102 great ideas that Alder and his staff of over 100 observed while reading 431 of the greatest books written by 71 authors. The number associated with The Syntopican are impressive indeed: 400,000 man-hours of reading, cost exceeding two million dollars, and eight years of Adler's life. The end results of the Syntopican are the 102 most reducible great ideas, from Angel to World, as presented by the most recognized authors, from Homer to Freud. When Adler uses "Great" to describe his 102 ideas, he means that they are fundamental or unreducible and that all other ideas reduce to them. So thorough was the work of Adler and his staff that he makes the claim that though 50 years elapsed since the 102 great ideas were chosen, nothing that has happened in last half-century, with the exception of Equality, necessitates a single addition or change to the list.
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