The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle
The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle by Neel Burton should be required reading for any college class in philosophy. This is the best book on philosophy I have ever read, and I have four master’s degrees.—Philip Van Heusen for Readers' Favorite
Most people go to Venice with a lover, but I went instead with Plato’s writings on love, the Lysis, Symposium, and Phaedrus, dispersed across two timeworn, clothbound Loebs that I had taken down from the top shelf on the top floor of Oxford’s best bookshop. Now that I am acquainted with the ladder of love, as you will soon be, I can see why those books were kept there, as near as possible to the sky.
Like many, I had read, and been inspired by, Plato’s Apology, on the trial of Socrates, but as a young medical graduate I did not know much more about the Greek philosophers. All I had was a vague sense that they, along with Homer, sat at the beginning of Western thought and civilization, and also at their pinnacle. The trip would be an opportunity, not only to see Venice, but to dig a little deeper.
One afternoon, I went for a long, aimless walk, and wound up in a walled garden, the Parco di Villa Groggia, with a theatre and follies of ancient ruins. It felt like a garden in Classical Athens, like, perhaps, Plato’s Academy—and the perfect place to start on the Phaedrus. As I read, I experienced one of those rare ecstatic communions that I discuss in my book on the emotions. Words written more than two thousand years ago, etched with a stylus into wax tablets, had, by some mysterious magic, succeeded in moving me to my very core.
Ecstatic communions, like oracular readings of the kind that set off Socrates, can be life-changing. Within five or six years, I had completed a master’s degree in philosophy, and read and outlined the collected works of both Plato and Aristotle. The outlines were published for the time-poor as Plato’s Shadow (2009) and Aristotle’s Universe (2011). Little did I know then that those two books would serve as groundwork for this one, the research for which would otherwise have been insurmountable!
My title is inspired by Edward de Bono (d. 2021), who, like me, began as a physician. In a nutshell, de Bono contrasted critical thinking, which is logical, adversarial, and judgmental, with ‘parallel’ thinking, which is open, cooperative, and, he argued, better suited to real-life problem solving. Critical thinking, with its emphasis on ‘the truth’, is rooted in the Socratic method pioneered by Socrates and codified by Plato and Aristotle. Renaissance humanists turned to this ‘Gang of Three’ to deliver them from Christian dogma, but their apparatus has since outlived this purpose, leaving us trapped in a form of thinking that is abstract, limited, and sterile.
The thesis is controversial, but it points to the sorts of issues and stakes involved, and the faintly disparaging title that I took from it, with its connotations of partiality and criminality, serves as a salutary reminder to my reverential self to look for the bad as well as the good.
For better or worse, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle engineered the Western mind. Above all, they formed part of a movement that stood at the crossroads of mythological and scientific-rational thought, at the crossroads of mythos and logos. Although the path of logos had already been beaten by the pre-Socratics, and would be paved by the Stoics, it is they, the Gang of Three, that forced the carriage to turn.
This book sets out to do three things: trace the journey from mythos to logos; outline the lives and thought of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; and, in the final analysis, consider their legacy, and what can still be gained from them, especially in the universal fields of mental health and human flourishing.
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were not philosophers in the narrow sense that we understand today, but in the broader, historical, etymological sense of being lovers of wisdom. They knew logic and dialectic, but they also knew how to live, and how to die—and it is in this, perhaps, that their greater strength lies.
The Ancient Wisdom series
The best, most beautiful, and most powerful ideas of the Classical World.
The first three books in the Ancient Wisdom series survey a thousand years of Western intellectual history, from the rise of the Greek city states to the peak height of the Roman Empire. This uniquely fertile period, which encompasses the Golden Age of Athens, began in mystical, mythological thought, and culminated in the hyper-rational, hyper-practical philosophy of the Stoics.
The incipient Christian religion absorbed and adapted, and for a long time occulted, many ancient doctrines, which is why, despite their remoteness, they can seem so strangely familiar. In the late Middle Ages, the rediscovery of Plato fuelled the humanistic Renaissance, which pushed back against the Church of Rome.
The Renaissance was a time of great hope and optimism, which, in many ways, proved premature. Faith provides a compelling reason to live, and a compelling reason to be good, which, for better or worse, many people have lost. For all our progress in science, technology, and education, more than one in five adults are now suffering from some form of depression. It’s almost as if we’ve come full circle, minus the philosophy.
Might it then be time to look afresh at these ancient ideas and find in them a happier way of living? Might it be time, in other words, for a new Renaissance?
Amazon US
Contact
