The first two of these three paragraphs is intended to precede the posting of April 19, and the third paragraph is to follow it; but I’m still learning how to edit this stuff so I’ll place it here as a separate post for now.
Mortimer Adler proposes one way to organize the Great Conversation: by means of the Great Ideas. I have sitting on my bookshelf, within arm’s reach, a tome of almost a thousand BIG pages in which Adler presents 102 essays under such headings as God, Justice, Love, and World.
Some time back I organized the Great Ideas in a way that made sense to me. By “organized” I mean I put them in an order where each concept could be seen as building on the preceding one. On this blog we could discuss both if proceeding by means of “great ideas” makes sense and is useful and whether putting the ideas in some logical sequence, with this one as a starting point, is worth talking about:
It seems to me we talk to each other about these ideas in one of two ways: by means of stories or statements—I want to say philosophical statements, in the sense that we pay close attention to the language because the meaning of our terms is especially important. Can we fit both the impact stories have on us and our attempts to use language precisely in order to manage our world well into the categories above?
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