Ancient Philosophy: Volume 3: On Socrates, Plato & Aristotle

He wrote nothing. He shaped two and a half millennia of Western thought. He systematized everything. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are the most cited figures in the history of Western philosophy -- and, in important respects, the most incompletely read. Socrates is known through a handful of famous exchanges and a death scene. Plato is represented in most introductions by four or five dialogues from a corpus of forty-four. Aristotle is divided among the specialists -- the logician, the biologist, the ethicist -- and rarely encountered as the unified thinker he was. Ancient Philosophy, Volume 3: On Socrates, Plato & Aristotle returns to the primary sources in full. Socrates is examined through all five ancient sources that give independent testimony: Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes, Aristotle, and Diogenes Laertius. The result is not a composite portrait but an honest account of a figure whose identity was contested almost from the moment of his death. The Cynics claimed him. The Stoics claimed him. The Sceptics claimed him. Recovering the historical Socrates requires working through disagreements that antiquity never resolved -- and acknowledging what cannot be recovered at all. Plato is treated through all forty-four surviving and attributed dialogues, from the early aporetic works through the great middle dialogues and into the systematic late writings that most introductions never reach. Particular attention is given to the Timaeus and Critias. The scholarly consensus of the past two centuries has treated the Atlantis narrative as Platonic invention. This volume challenges that consensus directly, on grounds that Plato himself draws: Critias explicitly distinguishes the Atlantis account from myth (mythos) and insists it is genuine history (alethinos logos). The Egyptian theological parallels, the specificity of the transmission chain through Solon, and the geological evidence for catastrophic flooding at the end of the last Ice Age are examined as converging evidence that a purely fictional origin for the narrative cannot easily explain. Aristotle is covered through the complete surviving corpus: the Organon from the Categories and On Interpretation through the Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, Topics, and Sophistical Refutations; the natural philosophy; the psychological writings; the Metaphysics; the ethical works from the Nicomachean Ethics and Eudemian Ethics to the Magna Moralia; the Politics, Rhetoric, and Poetics; and the lost and fragmentary works. Aristotle is treated as a systematic philosopher whose diverse investigations form a unified whole -- the most ambitious attempt in antiquity to bring every domain of human inquiry under a single disciplined method. This is the third volume in Michael Szymczyk's multi-volume series on the history of ancient philosophy. Volume 1 examined the pre-Greek intellectual traditions. Volume 2 covered thirty-four Pre-Socratic figures. Volume 4 turns to the Hellenistic and post-classical schools. Each volume is designed to be read independently; together they constitute a complete account of ancient philosophy from its pre-Greek origins to the close of the ancient schools.