Institute for Philosophical Research (Chicago, Ill.)

The Institute for Philosophical Research was established by Mortimer J. Adler in 1952, for the purpose of taking stock of Western thought on such topics as freedom, justice, happiness, progress, love, equality, and law. The Institute produced a treatise on the subject of love, The Idea of Love, by Robert Hazo in 1967. Mr. Hazo, along with other members of the staff (Mortimer J. Adler, Betty Beck, Otto Bird, V.J. McGill, Meyer M. Ossorgin, Gerald Temaner, Peter C. Wolff, Charles Van Doren, Charles Sullivan, and Mrs. Jacob Klein), examined excerpts from literary works, philosophers, psychologists, and theologians who wrote on love per se or referred to it in the course of their writings. Members of the Institute for Philosophical Research then evaluated and categorized these writings in preparation for the formulation of The Idea of Love. If the excerpts were considered inadequate they were placed in the slop file. However, the staff used the dialectical criterion on the authors whose work was acceptable in order to define more clearly their ideas and to categorize them to aid Hazo in the preparation of his formulations for The Idea of Love.