Great Books of the Western World

Mortimer J. Adler describes the opportunity of studying the Great Books of the Western World:

"Suppose there were a college or university in which the faculty was thus composed: Herodotus and Thucydides taught the history of Greece, and Gibbon lectured on the fall of Rome. Plato and St. Thomas gave a course in metaphysics together; Francis Bacon and John Stuart Mill discussed the logic of science; Aristotle, Spinoza, and Immanuel Kant shared the platform on moral problems; Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke talked about politics.
"You could take a series of courses in mathematics from Euclid, Descartes, Riemann, and Cantor, with Bertrand Russell and A.N. Whitehead added at the end. You could listen to St. Augustine, Aquinas and William James talk about the nature of man and the human mind, with perhaps Jacques Maritain to comment on the lectures.
"In economics, the lectures were by Adam Smith, Ricardo, Karl Marx, and Marshall. Boas discussed the human race and its races, Thorstein Veblen and John Dewey the economic and political problems of American democracy, and Lenin lectured on communism.
"There might even be lectures on art by Leonardo da Vinci, and a lecture on Leonardo by Freud. A much larger faculty than this is imaginable, but this will suffice.
"Would anyone want to go to any other university, if he could get into this one? There need be no limitation of numbers. The price of admission -- the only entrance requirement -- is the ability and willingness to read and discuss. This school exists for everybody who is willing and able to learn from first-rate teachers."
("Only Adults Can Be Educated", interview of Mortimer J. Adler with Max Weismann, in "Philosophy is Everybody's Business: Journal of the Center for the Study of The Great Ideas", Vol 3, No 1, 1996.)

The Great Books of the Western World were compiled by Mortimer Adler working with a staff, and published by Encyclopedia Britannica in 1952, then revised 1990.

Mortimer Adler, in his book "A Second Look in the Rearview Mirror", has talked about the difficulty of selecting "great books" for a collection. It is a particularly difficult problem with recent works, until we have some perspective.
Adler notes that the criterion for selection of a great book is not its "truth". Among these works are to be found opinions, backed up by careful reasoning or illustrations from life, on at least two sides of every one of the great questions. This is not to say that all views are equally correct, or that which views you adopt is of no consequence. Quite the contrary. But, you may only benefit by learning from mankind's greatest minds and, by contrasting and thinking for yourself, accepting the challenge to reconcile their reasonings with your own views.
What are the criteria for selecting great books? Adler lists three criteria:

the book has contemporary significance; that is, relevance to the problems and issues of our times;

the book is inexhaustible; it can be read again and again with benefit; and

the book is relevant to a large number of the great ideas and great issues that have occupied the minds of thinking individuals for the last 25 centuries. (Adler, "Second Look", pg 142; source)

See also Adler's additional comments on the process of selecting works for the 1990 edition of GBWW.

Adler writes: "The difference between great and good books is one of kind, not of degree. Good books are not "almost great" or "less than great" books. Great books are relevant to human problems in every century, not just germane to current twentieth-century problems. A great book requires to be read over and over, and has many meanings; a good book needs to have no more than one meaning, and it need be read no more than once."

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