Three Old Greeks

The usual Three Old Greeks are:

These guys did it all! Some wags have said that the entire history of philosophy is just an extended commentary on MrAristotle. There are a lot of other old Greeks like Pythagoras and others, but the big three are these. See SaintsAndHeroes (and GhostsInUs) for why it matters. -- RaySchneider

Hmmm. Not FourOldGreeks? (including MrDiogenes?) or FiveOldGreeks? (including MrAntisthenes?), the renowned Cynics.

Or is it that we have a different place for them?

Cynicism was one of several schools of Hellenistic philosophy - don't forget about the renowned Zeno and Epicurus just because they weren't cynics - and while they interacted, they existed to some extent separately. In contrast, no subsequent western philosophy could be discussed without some reference to Plato and Aristotle. So they occupy a separate, we-got-here-first kind of place.

The word "object" has a special meaning to these guys. LakoffAndJohnson touch on the extended commentary it has spawned, and offer another view of reality. We object-oriented programmers may be more aligned with the past than contemporary thought. But that might not be bad considering the goals of our programs and the limitations of our computers.

There is a great paper published at OOPSLA2000 exploring this idea: "An Aristotelian Understanding of Object-Oriented Programming" [http://swen.uwaterloo.ca/~drayside/].

Don't confuse them with ThreeOldGeeks.