Socrates, Plato and Aristotle: the Founding Triad and the Order of Greek Philosophy
There are three names that every history of Western philosophy is bound to utter in this order: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. The sequence is not arbitrary. It is a chain of direct transmission — Socrates was Plato’s teacher; Plato was Aristotle’s teacher — which, in little more than a century, turned Athens into the centre of rational thought in the ancient world and fixed the problems, the methods and the vocabulary that philosophy would use for the next two thousand years. ...