Mortimer J. Adler
Mortimer J. Adler (1902-2001) was an American philosopher, educator, and public advocate of liberal education best known for the Great Books movement, the Syntopicon, and the reading method codified in How to Read a Book.
In this wiki he matters as a theorist of reading-as-thinking. Adler treats hard books as active partners in the growth of the mind, not as information containers to be skimmed for takeaways. His framework emphasizes structured questioning, analytical reading, and syntopical reading across many books on one question.
He also stands behind a broader educational ideal. Reading is not just vocational preparation or content acquisition. It is one of the primary ways a person enters long arguments, learns to judge, and becomes harder to manipulate by slogans, summaries, and secondhand opinion.