MISSION OF THE CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF THE GREAT IDEAS

The Center has two primary missions: One, to help awaken citizens from their moral and intellectual slumbers and to help them understand why philosophy is everybody’s business: the possibility of finding sound and practical answers to questions about the good life and good society. And philosophy’s ability to answer the most basic normative questions, what ought we seek in life? and how ought we seek it?

Two, to promulgate the insights and ideals embedded in Dr. Adler’s lifelong intellectual work in the fields of Philosophy, Liberal Education, Ethics and Politics. To continue functioning as THE resource for, access to, and the on-going interpretation of his work.

PROGRAMS

The Center has and will continue to fulfill these missions through its tireless efforts to provide Dr. Adler’s vision, guidance, and resource materials through both live and on-line seminars, educational and philosophical consultation, international presence on the Internet, access to the Center’s library collection of books, essays, articles, journals and audio/video programs. It should be noted that the Center’s programs are unique in that they do not replicate other existing programs either started or developed by Dr. Adler, such as those offered by The Great Books Foundation, the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults at the University of Chicago, The Aspen Institute, The Paideia Group, or the Great Books curricula now found in some colleges and universities.

While we sanction and applaud the type of programs that these institutions offer as essential to a liberal education, the Center pushes the studies and inquiries further in following the lead of Aristotle who said in Nicomachean Ethics Book II, Chapter 2:

The purpose of the present study is not as it is in other inquiries, the attainment of knowledge, we are not conducting this inquiry in order to know what virtue is, but in order to become good, else there would be no advantage in studying it. For that reason, it becomes necessary to examine the problem of our actions and to ask how they are to be performed. For as we have said, the actions determine what kind of characteristics are developed.

Hence, the thrust and aim of the Center’s efforts are not only to help students and citizens to develop a cogent understanding of practical philosophy, which is essential to understanding the good society and the extent that it bears on the conditions required for responsible citizenship and the pursuit of happiness, but rather to motivate them to engage in the kind of conduct in their personal and public lives necessary to make a really good life for themselves.

It is our conviction that this understanding can be uniquely facilitated through a process of liberal learning based on syntopical reading, thinking about, and discussing Socratically The Great Ideas inherent in the great literature of our Western Tradition.

MANIFESTO

The only standard we have for judging all of our social economic, and political institutions and arrangements as just or unjust, as good or bad, as better or worse, derives from our conception of the good life for man on earth, and from our conviction that, given certain external conditions, it is possible for men to make good lives for themselves by their own efforts.

There must be sufficient truth in moral philosophy to provide a rational basis for the efforts at social reform and improvement in which all men, regardless of their religious beliefs or disbeliefs, can join. Such common action for a better society presupposes that the measure of a good society consists in the degree to which it promotes the general welfare and serves the happiness of its people—this happiness being their earthly and temporal happiness, for there is no other ultimate end that the secular state can serve.

A PLANNED LIFE

Plato’s Socrates observed that the unexamined life is not worth living. Our understanding of what he means will lead us to conclude that an unplanned life cannot be lived well. Therefore we ought to seek—a sound and practical plan of life that will help us to make our whole life good.

A plan of that character consists of a small number of prescriptions about the goods to be sought and the manner and order of seeking them. These prescriptions, formulated with a universality that makes them applicable to all men without regard to their individual differences or the special circumstances of their individual lives, constitute what little wisdom is possible for the moral philosopher to attain with reasonable certitude, and that little is nothing but a distillation of the wisdom of common sense.

CATEGORICAL PRESCRIPTIONS

That what is involved in making a good life for oneself can appeal to the truth of two basic propositions — both self-evidently true, both intuitively known.

(1) The good is the desirable.

(2) One ought to desire or seek that which is really good for oneself and only that which is really good.

SELF-EVIDENT TRUTHS

The truth of the categorical prescription that underlies every piece of reasoning that leads to a true prescriptive conclusion is a self-evident truth. We acknowledge a truth as self-evident as soon as we acknowledge the impossibility of thinking the opposite.

GOOD VS. RIGHT

It is a mistake to give primacy to right over the good; it stems from ignorance of the distinction between real and apparent goods — goods needed and goods wanted.

It is impossible to know what is right and wrong in the conduct of one individual toward another until and unless one knows what is really good for each of them and for everyone else as well.

Real goods, based on natural needs, are convertible into natural rights based on those same needs.

To wrong another person is to violate his natural right to some real good, thereby depriving him of its possession and consequently impeding or interfering with his pursuit of happiness.

The only goods anyone has a natural right to are real, not apparent, goods. We do not have a natural right to the things we want; only to those we need.

To each according to his wants, far from being a maxim of justice, makes no practical sense at all; for, if put into practice, it would result in what Thomas Hobbes called “the war of each against all,” a state of affairs he also described as “nasty, brutish, and short.”

The denial of natural rights, the natural moral law, and natural justice leads not only to the positivist conclusion that man made law alone determines what is just and unjust. It also leads to a corollary that inexorably attaches itself to that conclusion — that might makes right. This is the very essence of absolute or despotic government.

MIND AND REALITY

The human mind differs only in superficial respects from one time or culture to another, therefore common sense persons concur in thinking

(a) that the human mind is the same the whole world over, not only in all times and places but also in spite of the diversity of languages and cultures;

(b) that there exists a reality that is independent of our minds;

(c) that we have minds that enable us to know and understand that reality which, being independent of our minds, is the same reality for all of us, and;

(d) that our human experience of that independent reality has enough in common for all of us that we are able to talk intelligibly about it to one another.

THE CORE OF COMMON EXPERIENCE

The definition of common experience . . . involves two points, one negative, and the other positive. The negative point is that it consists of all the experiences we have without asking a single question that calls for steps of observation especially contrived for the purpose. The positive point is that it includes experiences which are the same for all men everywhere at all times.

PHILOSOPHY — A PUBLIC ENTERPRISE

A mode of inquiry aiming at knowledge has a public character:

(1) if the participants in the enterprise are willing and able to answer the same questions;

(2) if the questions or problems to be faced by the participants in the enterprise can be attacked piece meal, one by one, so that it is not necessary to answer all the questions involved in order to answer any one or some of them;

(3) if it possible for the participants to disagree as well as to agree about the answers to be given to the questions that direct the inquiry;

(4) if disagreements among the participants, when they arise, are adjudicable by reference to standards commonly accepted by participants in the enterprise;

(5) and if cooperation is possible among the participants; that is, if it is possible for a number of men working on the same problem or question to make partial contributions which are cumulative and which add up to a better solution than any one of them proposes.

LIBERAL EDUCATION, FREE MEN, AND DEMOCRACY

Liberal education is absolutely necessary for human happiness, for living a good human life.

Adult liberal education is an indispensable part of the life of leisure, which is a life of learning.

The aim of education is to cultivate the individual’s capacities for mental growth and moral development; to help him acquire the intellectual and moral virtues requisite for a good human life, spent publicly in political action or service and privately in a noble or honorable use of free time for the creative pursuits of leisure among which continued learning throughout life is preeminent.

Liberal education is education for leisure; it is general in character; it is for intrinsic and not an extrinsic end and, as compared with vocational training, which is the education of slaves or workers, liberal education is the education for free men.

If democratic citizens must be free men, they must have free minds, and minds cannot be made free except by being disciplined to recognize only one authority, the authority of reason.

Our schools are not turning out young people prepared for the high office and the duties of citizenship in a democratic republic. Our political institutions cannot thrive, they may not even survive, if we do not produce a greater number of thinking citizens, from whom some statesmen of the type we had in the eighteenth century might eventually emerge. We are, indeed, a nation at risk, and nothing but radical reform of our schools can save us from impending disaster. Whatever the price we must pay in money and effort to do this, the price we will pay for not doing it will be much greater.

The individual may be a good person in the sense of being virtuous. But a good person does not always succeed in the pursuit of happiness — in making a good life for himself or herself. Virtue by itself does not suffice for the attainment of the ultimate good. If it did, mankind would have little or no reason to carry on its age- old struggle for a good society, with liberty, equality, and justice for all.

If, in some way, the generations to come would learn what a good life is and how to achieve it and could be given the discipline, not only of mind but of character, that would make them willingly responsive to the categorical oughts of a teleological ethics, perhaps, then, the moral and educational revolution might begin and take hold.

To hope for this is to hope for no more than that the restoration of a sound and practical moral philosophy will enable enlightened common sense to prevail in human affairs.

PHILOSOPHY IS EVERYBODY’S BUSINESS

It cannot be too often repeated that philosophy is everybody’s business. To be a human being is to be endowed with the proclivity to philosophize. To some degree we all engage in philosophical thought in the course of our daily lives. Acknowledging this is not enough. It is also necessary to understand why this is so and what philosophy’s business is. The answer, in a word, is ideas. In two words, it is Great Ideas—the ideas basic and indispensable to understanding ourselves, our society, and the world in which we live.

These ideas, as we shall see, constitute the vocabulary of everyone’s thought. Unlike the concepts of the special sciences, the words that name the Great Ideas are all words of ordinary, everyday speech. They are not technical terms. They do not belong to the private jargon of a specialized branch of knowledge. Everyone uses them in ordinary conversation. But everyone does not understand them as well as they can be understood, nor has everyone pondered sufficiently the questions raised by each of the Great Ideas. To think one’s way through to some resolution of the conflicting answers to these questions is to philosophize.

The Great Ideas Program aims to do no more than to provide some guidance in this process. I am limiting the consideration of these ideas to an elementary delineation that will try to achieve three results for you.

First, it should give you a surer grasp of the various meanings of the word you use when you talk about the Idea.

Second, the delineation of each Idea should make you more aware than you normally are of questions or issues that you cannot avoid confronting if you are willing to think a little further about the Idea—basic ones, ones that human beings have been arguing about over the centuries.

Third, in the consideration of each Idea, we are led to the consideration of other ideas. How does our understanding of truth affect our understanding of goodness and beauty? How does our understanding of what is good and bad carry us not only to an understanding of what is right and wrong, but also to an understanding of justice, and how does that affect our understanding of liberty and equality as well?

If I succeed in these aims, I will have helped you engage in the business of philosophy, which is everybody’s business not only because nobody can do much thinking, if any at all, without using the Great Ideas, but also because no special, technical competence of the kind that is required for the particular sciences and other special disciplines is required for thinking about the Great Ideas. Everybody does it, wittingly or unwittingly.

I hope I am right in believing that everyone would wish to do it just a little better.

WHAT IS AN IDEA?

In the vocabulary of daily speech, the word “idea” is generally used to name the subjective contents of our own minds–things that each of us has in his or her own mind. This use of the word predominates in a large portion of modern psychology, concerned as it is with something called “the association of ideas” or “the stream of consciousness”–with the images we experience in dreams or in acts of imagination. It is a kind of omnibus term that covers all the contents of our minds when we have any conscious experience–our sensations and perceptions, our images and memories, and the concepts we form.

But that, obviously, is not the way the word “idea” is being used when we engage one another in the discussion of ideas. In order for a discussion between two or more persons to occur, they must be engaged in talking to one another about something that is a common object of their conjoined apprehension. They do not have a common object to discuss if each of them is speaking only of his own ideas in the subjective sense of the term.

Consider, for example, a number of individuals arguing with one another about liberty and justice, about war and peace, or about government and democracy. They probably differ in the way they subjectively think about these matters. Otherwise, they would not find themselves arguing about them. But it must also be true that they could not be arguing with one another if they did not have a common object to which they were all referring. That common object is an idea in the objective sense of the term.

These two uses of the one word “idea”–the subjective use of it to signify the contents of an individual’s conscious mind and the objective use of it to signify something that is a common object being considered and discussed by two or more individuals–may be a source of confusion to many. We might try to eliminate the source of confusion by restricting the use of the word “idea” to its subjective sense and substituting another mode of speech for “idea” in its objective sense. We might always use the phrase “object of thought” instead. Thus, freedom and justice, war and peace, government and democracy might be called objects of thought.

One other example may help to reinforce what has just been said. Let us turn from our thinking to our sense-experience of the world in which we live. We are in a room sitting at a table. On the table is a glass of wine. You are facing the light and I am sitting with my back to it. We have, therefore, different subjective impressions or perceptions of the color of the table and of the wine in the glass. But in spite of our divergent subjective perceptual experiences, we know that we are sitting at one and the same table and looking at one and the same glass of wine. We can put our hands on the table and move it. We can each take sips out of the same glass of wine. Thus, we know that the table and the glass of wine are one and the same perceptual object for both of us. It is that common object that we can talk about as well as move and use.

If this is clear, then I recommend that we use the word “idea” in its objective sense as a common object of thought that two or more individuals can discuss and either agree or disagree about. To eliminate the word “idea” in its objective sense and always use instead the phrase “object of thought.”

We live in two worlds: (1) the sensible world of the common perceptual objects that we move around and use in various ways and (2) the intelligible world of ideas, the common objects of thought that we cannot touch with our bodies or perceive with our senses, but that, as thinking individuals, we can discuss with one another.

THE ADJECTIVE “GREAT”

Readers of this may be puzzled and even annoyed by my repeated use of the adjective “great.” The great authors are the writers of the great books. They engage in a great conversation. What about? The great ideas. Are all these uses of the adjective related in an orderly way so that one can discern the primary use from which the other uses are derived and by which they are controlled?

I think I have an answer to that question, one that helps me to explain why there will always be controversies about which books, in the literature available to us, deserve to be called “great.” There are many different standards or criteria by which persons can judge a book to be great, and its writer a great author. Different groups of persons will, if called upon to do so, construct different lists of books that deserve the status of “great.” This is not the case when we consider ideas rather than books. Take the list of the 102 ideas exhibited here. There may be some disagreement about them, but it will be very slight, indeed; there are few of these ideas that anyone would recommend dropping and few that anyone would recommend adding.

If we take the adjective “great” as the qualifier of ideas and as the controlling criterion of our other uses of it, then many things are clarified, and little controversy is engendered. The great conversation is the discussion of the great ideas during the last twenty-five centuries of Western culture.

There may be other great ideas and other great conversations about them in three or four of the cultures in the Far East—Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian, and Taoist. But these are not only quite separate from one another, they are also extraneous to the great conversation about the 102 great ideas in Western literature and thought. At this stage in the history of the world, a world cultural community does not exist, and a global set of great ideas cannot be compiled. The future may hold the possibility of one global great conversation, but that lies far ahead of where we are today.

Given the reality of the great conversation for us who have inherited the Western tradition, it is that discussion of the great ideas that determines how we draw the line between books and authors that deserve to be called “great” and those that do not. But, it may be asked, what tangible evidence can be given of the reality of the great conversation? What shows us that such a conversation really has taken place from antiquity to the present day?

These ideas were derived from an extremely close analysis of 44 works by 73 authors from Homer to the twentieth century. This analysis was performed by a staff of specialized indexers under my direction, and the works analyzed were later published as Great Books of the Western World. The editorial staff that I headed found a way of demonstrating the existence of the great conversation. They constructed two indices—one called “The Author-to-Author Index;” the other called “The Author-to-Idea Index.”

The first of these indices listed, beginning with the Greek tragic poets and with Herodotus, who came chronologically after Homer, the authors they read and referred to or commented on. As we came down the chronological series of authors, the editorial staff listed all the preceding authors that any author in the series had obviously read and talked back to.

Obviously, earlier authors could not refer explicitly to their successors, but often points that they made anticipated what would be considered and challenged later. This Author-to-Author Index shows the great conversation going on across the centuries.

The fifty-four volumes of the first edition of Great Books of the Western World in 1952 ended with the works of such late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century authors as Herman Melville, William James, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud. Each of these authors was found to have read and commented on twenty-five or more of his predecessors. When six volumes of twentieth-century authors were added to the second edition of Great Books in 1990, fewer of these authors appear to have been as well read as their predecessors but for some, such as Alfred North Whitehead, Werner Heisenberg, Max Weber, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and James Joyce, their acquaintance with the works of their eminent predecessors is as clearly evident.

The Author-to-Idea Index provided another demonstration of the reality of the great conversation. The editorial staff listed, from Homer up to the twentieth- century authors, the number of great ideas that each author could be found discussing, counting the appearance of citations of their work in the topics under each idea. Thus, for example, Homer appears in 51 of the 102 great ideas, Herodotus in 71, Plato in 100, Aristotle in all 102, Plutarch in 79, Augustine in 97, Aquinas in 102, Dante in 84, Shakespeare in 79, Montaigne in 90, Francis Bacon in 97, Spinoza in 79, Gibbon in 88, Locke in 98, J. S. Mill in 82, Hegel in 97, Tolstoy in 96, Darwin in 71, Marx in 71, Freud in 91. When we come to the twentieth-century authors, their works, for the most part, are cited in fewer than half of the 102 great ideas.

In a sense, it is the Syntopicon itself—the topical index to discussions of the great ideas in the Great Books—with its almost 3,000 topics that provides the best evidence for the reality of the great conversation.

WHY 102 GREAT IDEAS?

The answer to this question is that the number could have been more or fewer than 102, but probably not much fewer than 92 or much more than 102. In other words, the number of 102 plus or minus 10. Why so?

Let me explain. One of the great ideas is GOVERNMENT. In outlining the topics that present the interior structure of that idea, we could have placed topics dealing with all the major forms of GOVERNMENT, such as TYRANNY AND DESPOTISM, MONARCHY, OLIGARCHY, ARISTOCRACY, and DEMOCRACY, but that would have made the chapter on government extraordinarily long and unwieldy; so, we chose instead to develop separate chapters on the different forms of government mentioned above. By doing so we increased the number of great ideas; if we had made the other choice, we would have decreased the number.

Another example is the chapter on VIRTUE AND VICE. Here we could have included among the topics of that chapter the consideration of particular virtues: COURAGE, TEMPERANCE, PRUDENCE, JUSTICE, and WISDOM. That would have reduced the number of great ideas, but we decided that to do this would make the chapter on VIRTUE AND VICE too long and cumbersome; so, we made the other choice.

In short, the number 102 is somewhat arbitrary, in terms of choices that we made for practical reasons. But its arbitrariness is limited. We could not have done the job with only 50 great ideas, or with 150. At no time in all the eight years of work on the production of the Syntopicon was there an outcry on the part of the editorial staff that some idea other than the 102 we had chosen was needed to accommodate a large and significant body of Western thought that could not be subsumed under the various topics of the 102 ideas that we had selected. Controversies since engaged in on the publication of the second edition of the Great Books of the Western World have, while including much criticism of the choice of authors, conspicuously avoided criticizing the choice of ideas.

I have thus answered as best I can what a great idea is, how the 102 were chosen, and why there are only 102 of them; that is, 102 plus or minus 10.

MORTIMER ALDER SORTING IDEAS INTO THEIR PROPER CATEGORIES

The two volumes that make up the Syntopicon comprise a distinctive kind of index. The term “syntopicon” means a collection of topics. In these two volumes there are nearly 3,000 topics parceled out among 102 ideas. The purpose of these volumes is to provide a subject-matter index to writings included in the Great Books of the Western World. Underlying the creation of the Syntopicon is the conviction that the books in this set have an overall unity in the discussion of common themes and problems. Such a unity exists because all of the books belong to the western tradition.

The lines along which a syntopical reading of the Great Books can be done are the main lines of the continuous discussion that runs through the thirty centuries of western civilization. This great conversation across the ages is the living organism whose structure the Syntopicon tries to articulate. It tries to show the many strands of this conversation between the greatest minds of western civilization on the themes which have concerned people in every epoch and which cover the whole range of humanity’s speculative inquiries and practical interests. To the extent it succeeds, it reveals the unity and continuity of the west.

The 102 ideas. The reader must be informed that the 102 ideas, along with their topics, were not imposed on the Great Books. They were, rather, sorted out by an intensive reading and rereading of the books by a sizable staff of scholars. There was, in other words, no attempt on the part of the editors to predigest or simplify the information available in this set. The intent was only to provide anyone interested in ideas a ready access to the set. Once it was decided to create an idea index, no alternative indexing style was possible. The use of the ideas demanded a topical and subtopical outline form to which references could be appended.

Why 102 ideas instead of an even 90, 100, or no? The present 102 is no magic number, nor is it intended to suggest that there are only that many ideas in the history of western thought. The presence of the Inventory of Terms, containing about 2,000 topic suggestions and concepts, clearly indicates otherwise. The number 102 represents only an editorial judgment made in the interest of constructing the Syntopicon, after careful and judicious reading of the books themselves—and with a general consensus about the major motifs of western society. It would have been possible, considering the contents of the books in the set, to have as few as 90 ideas or as many as 110.

The arrangement of the Syntopicon. The Syntopicon consists of three main parts: the 102 idea-chapters, a Bibliography of Additional Readings, and an Inventory of Terms. The 102 chapters and the Inventory of Terms, taken together, are the tools the reader uses to participate in the great conversation across the centuries within the context of each idea.

The 102 chapters comprise the heart (and bulk) of the Syntopicon. Each chapter has five parts: an introductory essay; an outline of topics; references to relevant works in the Great Books; cross-references to other chapters; and a list of additional readings.

The introductory essay defines the nature and scope of the idea and serves as a guide to its topics. It provides a foretaste of the great conversation contained in the passages cited in the reference section.

Immediately after the introductory essay there is the Outline of Topics, which exhibits the internal structure of the idea. The topics are the basic, elementary units of the Syntopicon. The average number of topics in a chapter is thirty, but the actual number varies from as few as six topics (Fate) to as many as seventy-three (God).

In the References the Outline of Topics is repeated, this time including the relevant citations for Great Books authors and works. References are arranged in the order in which the authors appear in the set, from Volume 3 to Volume 60. Examining the materials in chronological order enables the reader to follow the actual development of thought on a topic. References to the Bible, when present, are always placed first. The Bible is not included as part of the set, since there is no definitive edition acceptable to everyone.

Readers will notice that in some chapters a few topics contain no references. These topics serve as headings for other topics grouped analytically under them. The main topic, in other words, serves as a peg on which to hang the subtopics. Examples of such “open” topics can be found in the outlines on Being (8. Being and knowledge), Quantity (5. Physical quantities), and State (2. The general theory of the state).

The Cross-References make up the fourth part of each chapter. They direct readers to other chapters in which similar, or related, topics are considered. By relating the topics of one chapter to those of other chapters, the Cross-References show the interconnection of the ideas.

The last segment of each chapter is the list of Additional Readings. Large and diverse as the number of works in the Great Books is, they do not exhaust the number of authors or books that have made signal contributions to the ideas of western civilization. The Additional Readings provide a listing of other works on each idea. Each list is divided into two sections. The first group consists of works written by authors represented in the Great Books. The second group lists works by other authors. In both lists the authors are in a general chronological order. The reader will note that every attempt has been made to bring the lists of Additional Readings as up-to-date as possible, including some books published in 1990. By contrast, the latest copyright date of the most recent 20th-century works included in the set is about 1950. (The reasons for this are explained in the book The Great Conversation.)

For the convenience of the reader, the authors and titles in all 102 lists are compiled into a single alphabetical list in the Bibliography of Additional Readings in the second volume of the Syntopicon. The Bibliography provides authors’ full names, complete book titles, and dates of publication.

The Inventory of Terms, an alphabetically arranged glossary at the end of Volume 2, cannot be emphasized strongly enough. Readers who want only to study a specific idea can simply turn to it, since the ideas are arranged alphabetically from Angel to World. But the number of ideas is only 102, while the Inventory of Terms offers about 2,000 other concepts on which to draw. Suppose, therefore, that a reader wants to study a topic that is not the name of one of the ideas—imperialism, ecology, quantum mechanics, or the generation gap, for example. Few people have the patience to pore through hundreds of topics in many outlines. The most direct approach is to go directly to the Inventory of Terms. There, the student of imperialism will be referred to more than a half-dozen idea outlines.

Because all of the 102 ideas have been included in the list, the Inventory of Terms is also quite useful for expanding the research possibilities for each of the ideas. None of the ideas stands as an isolated, self-contained entity. Many interrelationships exist between them: between Citizen, Constitution, Democracy, Government, and State, for instance; or between God, Prophecy, Religion, Sin, and Theology. By consulting the Inventory of Terms, the reader can see immediately how wide-ranging a particular idea is. The inventory is thus an aid in ascertaining the contexts within which an idea can be studied.

Ways of using the Syntopicon. A perusal of the Syntopicon will make evident the various ways it can be used. At the simplest level, a reader can take one topic within one outline (Science 2a. The relation between science and religion, for example) and look up the references to it. A slightly broader range of interest may lead a reader to do research on a major topic that has several subtopics: Liberty 1. Natural freedom and political liberty, is a good example, since the subject has eight subtopics. Some individuals may be zealous enough to do research on a whole idea, by looking up all the references to all the topics in it.

Readers who feel ready to plunge right into the reference sections of the Syntopicon would do well to familiarize themselves with the entire outline in which they intend to work. The outlines, devoid of references, are printed immediately following the essays. Familiarity with the whole outline will assure that the researcher is using the right topic within the correct idea.

What if the location of the topic is unknown? This is when the Inventory of Terms comes in handy. One may want to see what the Great Books authors have to say about a very timely issue—the environment. Since “environment” is not one of the 102 ideas, it is necessary to consult the Inventory first.

Having found the word “environment” in the Inventory, the reader is confronted with half a dozen or more different idea names, some with more than one topic listed. Which is the right one? The only way to be sure is to check the outlines and topics listed. Having looked at the relevant outlines, the most promising one for research is Life and Death 4., The biological economy in ecological systems. It is the broadest in scope of the similar topics related to the environment. But consulting the other outlines has not been a waste of time. The topics found there suggest how research on the environment may be filled out. Indeed, the reader may get a deeper perspective on the issue by seeing how it is treated under different ideas.

The Inventory of Terms is also useful for finding synonyms and cognate terms. For instance, the word “ecology” is closely related to environment. As it happens, the topics suggested for ecology are almost the same ones listed after environment in the Inventory. Life and Death 4., The biological economy in ecological systems, is cited in both places, leading us to conclude it is the most appropriate topic for starting the research.

Looking for the proper environmental topic was instructive. It indicated the extent to which single issues can become multifaceted and thus be treated in different contexts. Look, for instance, at the term education in the Inventory. It is followed by a list of about two-dozen ideas and even more topics. It is immediately obvious that education can be studied in itself as an idea; but it can also be investigated under such rubrics as: education for citizenship, the role of education in a democracy, the educative function of law, and many more.

If contexts can be narrowed, they can also be widened. A really ambitious researcher may wish to construct a hierarchy of ideas on which to work. Taking State as the overarching theme, the following ideas become the objects of study: Aristocracy, Citizen, Constitution, Democracy, Government, Law, Liberty, Monarchy, Oligarchy, Punishment, Slavery, Tyranny and Despotism, War and Peace, and Wealth. After researching an idea as broad as State or a more narrowly defined topic, the reader may want to consult the Cross-References printed after the reference sections in a given outline. These point to associated topics in other outlines.

Examples of Syntopicon use. Having settled on the environment as a research topic, we turn to the reference section of Chapter 48: Life and Death, to locate topic 4., The biological economy in ecological systems. There we find references by volume, author, and page numbers. In this case, the references range from Herodotus in the 5th century B.C. to such recent authors as Anton Chekhov, Alfred North Whitehead, and C. H. Waddington. Should we decide to look up all the references, these are the authors we shall be consulting: Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen, Lucretius, Plotinus, Aquinas, Galileo, Pascal, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Smith, Kant, Melville, Darwin, Ibsen, Whitehead, Waddington, Chekhov. After reading these selections, turn to the Cross-References for additional material. In this case there is only one cross-reference relevant to the environment: Animal 11b. The relation between the living organism and its environment. The abundance of material found under this topic will add significantly to the material gleaned from Life and Death 4.

Suppose we had done the more ambitious research project on State and its related ideas, as described above. Had all the references been consulted, there would still be much more material to be found. The Cross-References, in Chapter 90: State, cite many topics from ideas that were not among the primary ones associated with State. Among the many secondary topics associated with State are the following: Animal id; Education 8a; Family 2a-2c; History 43(3); Labor 5-5d; Language 1; Progress 4b; Religion 4-4b; and Science Ib(2).

It should be clear from the foregoing that the Great Books provide the opportunity for virtually any kind of use, from the pure pleasure of reading to the most intensive and detailed research.