Productive Knowledge in Ancient Philosophy
The Concept of TechnĂȘ
Thomas Kjeller Johansen, Thomas Kjeller Johansen
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Productive Knowledge in Ancient Philosophy
The Concept of TechnĂȘ
Thomas Kjeller Johansen, Thomas Kjeller Johansen
About This Book
This work investigates how ancient philosophers understood productive knowledge or technĂȘ and used it to explain ethics, rhetoric, politics and cosmology. In eleven chapters leading scholars set out the ancient debates about technĂȘ 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 technĂȘ, the use of technĂȘ as a paradigm for virtue and practical rationality, technĂȘÂŽs determining role in Platonic conceptions of cosmology, technĂȘÂŽs relationship to experience and theoretical knowledge, virtue as an 'art of living', the adaptability of the criteria of technĂȘ to suit different skills, including philosophy itself, the use in productive knowledge of models, deliberation, conjecture and imagination.