THE BIG THREE, Neel Burton

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.

THE BIG THREE is a potted history of the lives and thoughts of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and is more entertaining than that sounds, at least in part because Burton is quite happy to call the great philosophers and their various associates and contemporaries out when they’re being complete dicks. Socrates was an arse. Their various antecedents and hangers-on were arses and generally tried to out-arse each other.

Heraclitus, it seems, did not have any teachers or students, but did in time sprout followers such as Cratylus. According to Aristotle, Cratylus espoused such a radical theory of flux that he berated Heraclitus for saying that one cannot step twice into the same river, ‘for he himself held that it cannot be done even once.’ Cratylus ended up thinking that one ought not speak, and resorted instead to indiscriminately wagging his finger.

Most of them were arses. But some had wit.

The almost centenarian Cratinus defended his own drinking with the line, ‘You’ll never fashion anything clever by drinking water!’

It bogged down for me towards the back, with an exhaustive/endless tour through the million fucking works of Aristotle, a journey that has convinced me never to read Aristotle. Until that point, however, it is a terrific historical situating of the philosophers in their times and places, and of all the ways these periods continue to underpin our present condition.

In 770 BCE, close contact with the Phoenicians in the east led to the adoption of a phonetic system of language notation. The Greeks adapted the Phoenician abjad (an alphabet with only consonants), which had been developed for a semitic language, to include vowels, thereby creating the basis of our own modern alphabet.

Lots of fun.

Xanthippe’s shrewishness captured the imagination of later writers, who took to inventing or repeating stories about her, for instance, that she trampled upon a cake sent by Alcibiades, or that she emptied the chamber pot over Socrates’ head—prompting Socrates to remark, ‘After thunder comes the rain.’

THE GANG OF THREE: SOCRATES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE, Neel Burton (UK) (US+)

According to Protagoras, the value of an opinion lies not in its truth but in its usefulness to the person that holds it—a slippery position that could readily be seized upon by scoundrels.