CONCEPT
The Greek Gang of Three
De Bono's irreverent label for <em>Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle</em> — whose legacy of binary logic and categorical thinking he blamed for the Western intellectual tradition's structural deficit in creative method.
The Greek Gang of Three was de Bono's deliberately provocative name for the three philosophers he held responsible for what he considered the fundamental flaw in Western intellectual tradition: the dominance of rock-logic thinking — fixed categories, binary classification, the principle of non-contradiction — at the expense of water-logic thinking, which handles flow, tendency, and associative movement. De Bono argued that Western education, Western management, and Western public discourse had all been shaped by the Gang's categorical framework, and that the shaping had produced a civilization powerful in analysis and impoverished in creativity.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The critique was not directed at the Gang themselves but at what de Bono considered the uncritical inheritance of their approach. Aristotelian logic built the bridges of Western scientific and legal thought; de Bono was explicit that rock logic builds bridges that do not fall down. The problem was not that rock logic existed but that it had colonized territory it was not suited