Productive Knowledge in Ancient Philosophy

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