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Socrates vs. Plato vs. Aristotle

The Dilemma: If you’ve seen one smart old Greek guy in a bedsheet, you’ve seen ’em all.

People You Can Impress: philosophy majors, Greeks, and any lingering fans of Bill & Ted’s
Excellent Adventure

The Quick Trick: It’s simple! Just think of them in reverse alphabetical order: Socrates taught
Plato who taught Aristotle who taught Alexander the Great.

The Explanation:
Like many a good philosopher, Socrates (470–399 or so BCE) was obsessed with truth and the
correct way to stumble into it. In fact, in his effort to find truth, Socrates placed value not just on
knowledge, but on how we know knowledge, and his inquisitive teaching style refl ected it. For
one thing, Socrates never lectured. Instead, he asked questions on top of questions (a teaching
method still used to this day). The more his students answered, the more they knew or, more
accurately, learned what they didn’t know. For example, when you ask yourself, “Do I hate my job
because I’m awful at it, or am I awful at my job because I hate it?” you’re being Socratic in your
search. As a master philosopher, Socrates’ greatest rhetorical tool was irony, but not the
Seinfeld-ian kind. Socratic irony is a tactic by which one pretends to be ignorant of another’s
dogmatic beliefs. And by asking apparently “innocent” questions, Socrates would then tear the
other’s position to ribbons.

Unfortunately for Socrates, endless questioning is also extremely annoying, and the barefoot
philosopher’s inquisitiveness made him powerful enemies. Put on trial for “corrupting the youth,”
Socrates was forced to commit suicide by drinking hemlock.

Luckily for us, his work lived on through his students. If Socrates wrote anything, it didn’t survive.
But his question-and-answer sessions were recorded by his pupils, Plato and Xenophon, in the
dialogues. The former (427–347 BCE, give or take) also took it upon himself to expand on
Socrates, and in the later dialogues Socrates is mostly AWOL, meaning it’s all Plato. Plato’s work
didn’t stop with the dialogues. His own writings dealt mostly with government, law, ethics, and
reason. Today The Republic is considered Plato’s major masterwork. In fact, his treatise on a
“good city” is still a “must read” for poli-sci majors in universities everywhere.

Of these three philosophical bigwigs, however, it was Plato’s student Aristotle (384–322 BCE)
who had the most expansive intellect (not to mention the shortest beard). Aristotle wrote on
literally every subject of the day, from metaphysics and government to mathematics and natural
science. In fact, his renown as a polymath is what led Macedonian King Philip II (359–366 BCE)
to choose Aristotle as a tutor for his son, Alexander. Aristotle departed from his two predecessors’
line of thought, relying more on sensory input as a source of knowledge. Today Aristotle is
thought of as the granddaddy of the scientific method—despite the fact that he relied on pure
reason, not experiment, to come to a conclusion, and as a result was wrong a breathtakingly
large percentage of the time.