Productive Knowledge in Ancient Philosophy: The Concept of Techne

Description

This work investigates how ancient philosophers understood productive knowledge or techne and used it to explain ethics, rhetoric, politics and cosmology. In eleven chapters leading scholars set out the ancient debates about techne from the Presocratic and Hippocratic writers, through Plato and Aristotle and the Hellenistic age (Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics), ending in the Neoplatonism of Plotinus and Proclus. Amongst the many themes that come into focus are: the model status of ancient medicine in defining the political art, the similarities between the Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions of techne, the use of techne as a paradigm for virtue and practical rationality, technes determining role in Platonic conceptions of cosmology, technes relationship to experience and theoretical knowledge, virtue as an 'art of living', the adaptability of the criteria of techne to suit different skills, including philosophy itself, the use in productive knowledge of models, deliberation, conjecture and imagination.

Thomas Kjeller Johansen is a Professor of Philosophy in the Institute of Philosophy, Classics, History of Ideas and Art at the University of Oslo. He was previously a Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Oxford and Tutorial Fellow at Brasenose College. He is the author of Aristotle on the Sense-Organs (Cambridge, 1997), Plato's Natural Philosophy (Cambridge, 2004) and The Powers of Aristotle's Soul (2012).

'The book is well produced ... Johansen has skillfully assembled a rich collection of papers that can be read with benefit not only in its parts but also as a whole.' James L. Zainaldin, Bryn Mawr Classical Review