Meet the Fathers of Philosophy: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle

To this day, most of the Western way of thinking stems from the philosophical explorations of three men of Ancient Greece. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. No question you have heard of these philosophers. 

According to Hannah Fieldings, Award-Winning Romance Novelist, she started to investigate for her latest novel, Aphrodite’s Tears, placed in Greece and inspired by Ancient Greek mythology. Unsurprisingly, she encountered these names repeatedly. She was captivated to learn more about these men since she realized that while they became legends, in a way, their work was reality, not fiction, and its impact has stood the test of over 2,000 years of history.

Socrates

The Roman political leader Cicero named Socrates ‘the first who brought philosophy from the heavens, put it in cities, presented it to families, and compelled it to scrutinize it into life and morals, and good and bad.’ In the fifth century BC, Athens was a center of learning and thinking, and its citizen Socrates was an inventive young man. Even if it was illegal at the time ‘to question things above the heavens or below the Earth, topics regarded as impious,’ Socrates took upon himself to question it public (known as the Socratic Method of Teaching).

What made Socrates so intriguing is that he did not paint himself as a wise man. This premise was the basis for his entire philosophical career:

True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing.

When the oracle at Delphi declared Socrates the wisest man in the world, Socrates’ career began. One might assume that Socrates would have been thrilled by this declaration, quite a boost for his ego! However, he was puzzled and quite skeptical. He decided to test his wisdom by interviewing other men thought to be wise. He realized that he was indeed the wiser man, simply for being ‘very aware of [his] ignorance.’

‘I am wiser than he is to this small extent– that I do not believe that I know what I do not know’ from The Apology of Socrates (by Plato).

However, for Socrates, ‘wise’ men did not delight in having their wisdom thrown into question. This resulted in his conviction for corrupting the city’s youth, followed by his death sentence for his ‘crime.’

Plato

Different from Socrates, Plato was an aristocrat. However, his wealth and status in Athens did not stop him from being an eager pupil of Socrates. He took every little thing Socrates had thought of him and built upon it. He built a body of work infused with such paramount meaning that scholars have credited him the foundations for modern Western philosophy, mathematics, political thought, science, and even spirituality.

To Plato, thinking is ‘the talking of the soul with itself.’ According to his teachings, the soul is immortal, and that life traps the soul in the body. Perception is critical: for example, he describes people in a cave that can only see shadows on the walls in his Allegory of the Cavern; yet if they turned around, they would know what was casting those shadows and therefore be wiser.

In Athens, Plato founded his school of thought, the Academy, a center of skeptical philosophy for 300 years and had many noteworthy students, including Aristotle. In the 16th century, Raphael, an Italian Renaissance artist, illustrated the Academy in his masterpiece, The School of Athens, pictured above.

Aristotle

Aristotle moved to Athens in his teenage years to study at Plato’s Academy for some twenty years, until the passing of his teacher, Plato. He was Plato’s finest student, and all the knowledge he obtained from him made Aristotle a top job: tutor of Alexander the Great ( he was most likely the best-paid philosopher in history). Later developed his philosophical school called the Peripatetic school at the Lyceum, a temple devoted to Apollo. (Peripatetic originates from the Greek peripateo, ‘to walk around’; Aristotle liked to walk while he thought and taught.).

Aristotle was more interested in reasoning than the metaphysical plane, leading to the founding of logical theory. He also believed that life is essentially about finding happiness; however, the individual holds power: ‘Happiness depends on ourselves,’ he stated.

There is outstanding practicality to Aristotle’s wisdom to ensure that it makes much sense even to this day. Take, for instance:

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.

Uncomplicated but powerful. He likewise advocated moderation, that we should search for ‘The Golden Mean,’ the middle ground between 2 extremes.

However, Fielding’s favorite Aristotelian wisdom is: 

Love is composed of a single soul abiding in two bodies.

He was borrowing from a tale by Plato from his dialogue The Symposium, in which humans at first had four arms and four legs, and two faces. However, their incredible strength threatened to overpower the gods. As punishment, Zeus divided them in half, leaving one-half male and the other female, thus weakening the humans and doubling the number that would worship the gods. Ever since that day, each human has longed for their other half, the other half of their soul and an individual can know no higher fulfillment than uniting with their soulmate.

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