The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle (Ancient Wisdom)

“Popular philosophy”, at its best striving towards the clarity of Sarah Bakewell, with a very easy, conversational style, made awkward with the use of occasional obscure words, whose meaning you can infer from context and derivation, but which cheapen the prose (for example, perdure).
Often paragraphs are “factoids” or anecdotes, as Burton races to provide historical context for his main chapters, or provide an amusing or interesting story, which only tangentially touch on the main subjects of the book. This can make it feel that having made a note of some story, Burton packs it into the book even though it doesn’t really add anything. Perhaps inevitably there is repetition of facts/stories across chapters, although sometimes show more this feels like lazy editing.

I sometimes felt that I was reading a rant by an imbalanced writer, such as: The pre-Socratics began the monumental shift from mythos to logos, even if the two remain entwined in their thought—as perhaps they should when we consider how their divorce has led to the rape of the planet and a dehumanizing loss of vigour and imagination. This unsupported personal opinion detracted from my confidence in the rigour and balance of the author in presenting his analysis of these philosophers. show less

Some nice context to the three’s major works with decent cliff notes style write ups but that’s about it. There seemed to be no conclusion offered other than a quickie summary chapter with what seemed to me to be random and jumpy conclusions. I loved Burton’s The Art of Failure and based on this book’s description I expected something insightful instead of a quasi introductory text.