Editing Mortimer J. Adler (section)

=== Intellectual development and philosophic evolution ===
While doing newspaper work and taking night classes during his adolescence, Adler encountered works of men he would come to call heroes: [[Plato]], [[Aristotle]], [[Thomas Aquinas]], [[John Locke]], [[John Stuart Mill]], and others, who "were assailed as irrelevant by [[Counterculture of the 1960s|student activists in the 1960s]] and subjected to '[[politically correct]]' attack in later decades."<ref name=word-gems>{{Citation|url=http://www.word-gems.com/philos.adler.died.html |title=Mortimer Adler: 1902–2001 – The Day Philosophy Died |publisher=Word gems |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110410224053/http://www.word-gems.com/philos.adler.died.html |archive-date=2011-04-10}}</ref> His thought evolved toward the correction of what he considered "philosophical mistakes", as reflected in his 1985 book ''[[Ten Philosophical Mistakes: Basic Errors in Modern Thought]]''.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Adler |first=Mortimer J. |url=https://archive.org/details/tenphilosophical0000adle_g0l0 |title=Ten philosophical mistakes |publisher=Macmillan |year=1985 |isbn=0025003305 |location=New York, N.Y.}}</ref> In Adler's view, these errors were introduced by [[Descartes]] on the continent and by Thomas Hobbes and [[David Hume]] in Britain, and were caused by a "culpable ignorance" about Aristotle by those who rejected the conclusions of dogmatic philosophy without acknowledging its sound classical premises. These modern errors were compounded and perpetuated, according to Adler, by [[Kant]] and the [[Idealism|idealists]] and [[Existentialism|existentialists]] on the one side, and by [[John Stuart Mill]], [[Jeremy Bentham]], and [[Bertrand Russell]] and the English [[Analytic philosophy|analytic tradition]] on the other. Adler held that he corrected these mistakes with reference to insights and distinctions drawn from the [[Aristotelianism|Aristotelian]] tradition.