A Syntopicon: An Index to The Great Ideas

A Syntopicon: An Index to The Great Ideas (1952) is a two-volume index, published as volumes 2 and 3 of Encyclopædia Britannica’s collection Great Books of the Western World. Compiled by Mortimer Adler, an American philosopher, under the guidance of Robert Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, the volumes were billed as a collection of the 102 great ideas of the western canon. The term “syntopicon” was coined specifically for this undertaking, meaning “a collection of topics.”[1] The volumes catalogued what Adler and his team deemed to be the fundamental ideas contained in the works of the Great Books of the Western World, which stretched chronologically from Homer to Freud. The Syntopicon lists, under each idea, where every occurrence of the concept can be located in the collection’s famous works.
Contributors: William Gorman, Herman Bernick, Otto Bird, Peter Wolff, Robbrt Anderson, Donald Hollenhorst, Daniel Fetler, Aaron Bell, Leonard Olsen, Norman Atwood Garis, Saul Bellow, Janet Pollak, John Harmon, Joan Bernick, John Sledge, Gertrude Jaeger, Seymour Cain, William Sparks, Jack Landau, Robert Campbell, Dorothy Hodson Vining, Richard Lewis, Frederic Camper, Ursula von Eckardt, Werner Low, Joyce Connor, Eleanor Frank White, Charles Nelson, Mary Jane Deiches, Benjamin Zimmerman, Heloise Olsen, Gordon Dupee, Mary Reis, Raymond Ellinwood, Thomas Cosgrove, Iola Scofield, William Gerhard, James Doyle, Shirley Shapiro, Robert Hemenway, James Ellington, Margaret Stern