Johansen, Thomas Kjeller (ed.). Productive Knowledge in Ancient Philosophy: The Concept of Technê. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2021, xiv + 316 pp.

Productive Knowledge in Ancient Philosophy examines the concept of τέχνη in ancient philosophy, spanning from Sophistic philosophy (Protagoras) to Neoplatonism (Proclus). Similar attempts to track the notion of τέχνη throughout ancient philosophy have certainly been made before, but they only reach the Hellenistic age. Isnardi Parente 1966^[1] is a notable piece of secondary literature in Italian; Löbl 1997,^[2] 2003^[3] and 2008^[4] is a majestic collection in German. This book is an important addition to existing literature and an excellent effort both as teaching material and as scholarly contribution.

The title bears the translation of τέχνη as ‘productive knowledge,’ but the remainder of the book shows the consistent and agreeable choice to leave the translation (or lack thereof) of τέχνη up to each individual author. This is one crucial way of being true to the multifaceted notion of τέχνη, whose meaning can only partially be reproduced by any of the common (yet reasonable) translations, such as ‘art,’ ‘craft,’ ‘skill,’ or ‘expertise.’ Throughout the volume, we encounter a variety of translations depending on the philosopher at stake and the aspect in focus. Nevertheless, it is possible not only to follow the narrative of the concept of τέχνη over a millennium, but also to pinpoint recurrent sub-themes and trace them across different chapters. Examples include the paradigmatic case of medical expertise, the understudied prospect of bad arts, the very possibility of a divine craft, and the concepts of invention and discovery. It is also to be appreciated that the authors engaging with philosophers other than Plato and Aristotle openly state the difficulty of reconstructing the notion of τέχνη of such philosophers, being clear at the outset about the absence of a specific discussion and thus employing tailored and well-justified research strategies.

The volume is composed of eleven chapters preceded by an introduction. In that introduction, T. K. Johansen touches upon key aspects of the pre-philosophical notion of τέχνη and presents its philosophical connotation as mainly epistemological. While τέχνη is primarily a form of knowledge, Johansen does not fail to underscore its tight relation to ethics and politics, as well as to cosmology. Although the chapters follow a chronological order, I am going to first tackle the ones concerning τέχνη and its relation to ethics and politics. Next, I am going to consider the chapters on τέχνη as primarily a form of knowledge, and finally the contributions on the relation between τέχνη and cosmology across Plato and Neoplatonic philosophers.

In the opening chapter, E. Hussey reconstructs Protagoras’s account of political τέχνη by resorting to Plato’s dialogues (Protagoras in the first part; Theaetetus in the second part) and claiming that Plato therein attempts to present Protagoras’s view fairly. Against some commentators, he argues that Protagoras’s account of political τέχνη is internally coherent by exposing its analogy with the Hippocratic medical art. Just as the Hippocratic medical art aims at producing and maintaining health in bodies, Protagoras’s political τέχνη aims at producing and maintaining flourishing in the city. Political τέχνη even turns out to be a necessity for survival insofar as it changes people’s perceptions and opinions to the better. Like medicine, political τέχνη is accordingly a source of human progress and its success is subject to public verification; in turn, public verification strengthens the consensus surrounding the discipline and proves its very existence. Hussey agrees with other commentators that Protagoras’s political τέχνη is incomplete, but he interestingly suggests that the actual content of Protagoras’s teaching is intentionally kept undisclosed. Nowadays a personal trainer at the gym would not walk a customer through all exercises to prove herself competent and worth the money. For the same reason, we never find out the content of Protagoras’s teachings.

The next two chapters discuss both Plato and Aristotle. T. Nawar’s declared goal is to clarify three central claims advanced in Republic I and to show how relevant they prove for Aristotle’s thought. The claims are the following: 1) τέχναι are two-ways abilities; 2) no craftsman ever errs; 3) τέχναι are good-directed. The two-wayness of τέχνη, endorsed by both Plato and Aristotle, refers to the maker’s ability to produce contrary results: the doctor can both restore health and cause disease. The second claim ascribes infallibility to the craftsman: Nawar tracks it in Thrasymachus’s words and in Aristotle’s distancing τέχνη from luck. Nawar’s interpretation of the third claim, i. e., that τέχνη is directed to some good, is perhaps the most striking and thought-provoking. Nawar’s thesis is that τέχνη cannot be said “to be good-directed in any particularly strong sense and the claim is less important than is sometimes thought” (p. 61). He arrives at this conclusion by showing that τέχνη’s good-directedness can refer to different things. In Plato’s case, τέχνη can be directed towards the good of its object or/and the good of its practitioner; τέχνη can also be said to be good either because it is intrinsically valuable or because it aims at some higher good. None of these alternatives really manages to stand out, and this is the case also because it is not clear how compatible they are with τέχνη’s two-wayness and the possibility of bad crafts. Aristotle’s similar ambivalence about the good-directedness of τέχνη can be inferred from his claims that the craftsman needs neither to know the good of her craft nor to be motivated by good desires.

R. Barney also takes up a traditional issue, perhaps the most studied: the craft-model as applied to ethics and politics. Her chapter, however, is not yet another paper on ethical intellectualism. First, she clarifies that the craft model is not Socratic dogma but a sophistic aspiration (taken seriously by Plato), and that it is first and foremost political and only by extension ethical. Moreover, she claims that, in Plato’s works, τέχνη is a model for political and ethical matters not so much for its epistemological grounds, but for its deontological dimension. Her argument is that crafts provide practical identities that are “reason-giving, norm-imposing” (p. 78), and make the possessors committed to the craft they entertain. According to Barney’s interpretation, Plato establishes the existence of a craft of the human good. This craft is similar to other crafts insofar as it is structured by practical identities that are oriented towards disinterested ends, but it differs from the other crafts in that it is non-optional, directs the other τέχναι, and provides non-defeasible practical reasons.

The Stoic and the Epicurean notions of τέχνη are covered in two chapters by V. Tsouna. Taken together, they can be thought of as a summary of the rather fragmentary Hellenistic theory of τέχνη. The definitions of τέχνη provided by Stoic as well as Epicurean authors are, in fact, several. In both cases, however, τέχνη is opposed to unmethodical skills in that it is a ἕξις or διάθεσις on the basis of which the expert can provide explanations, teach her τέχνη (epistemological side of τέχνη), and act skillfully (psychological side of τέχνη). Like the other τέχναι, the art of living, too, is methodical and anchored in experience. Tsouna explains the differences between the Stoic and Epicurean notions of τέχνη in terms of their different debts to Plato. The Stoics provide a more rationalistic account of the art of living, which they take to be a higher-order art concerning the whole of life and aiming at happiness, and whose only expert is the sage. This means that the value of first-order τέχναι and their products is relative; they are beneficial only when employed correctly. The sage should therefore practice first-order τέχναι only for the profitable, because cultivating those arts in a more technical way would entail losing a close connection to nature and involve false beliefs and empty desires. Unlike the Stoics, the Epicureans hold no creationist model according to which nature works intentionally, and so there is no external finality in the development of τέχναι. Another difference is that, although the ground of a τέχνη is empirical for both philosophies, the Stoics identify τέχνη with cognitions (καταλήψεις) whereas Epicureans find it in the observation (παρατήρησις) of commonalities, thus giving more value to common experience. As for Tsouna’s reconstruction of the Stoic notion of τέχνη, noteworthy is her stand against the common view that the Stoic sage is omniscient. Indeed, she offers a far more appealing interpretation according to which the Stoics are more commonsensical: the sage is not an expert in every τέχνη, but is superior because of the art of living. In other words, the sage does not know more or all, but better, i. e., in the right way, making the right use, and in a stable manner. In Tsouna’s discussion of the Epicurean τέχνη, she interestingly raises the possibility of understanding Epicurus’s physics as a τέχνη aiming at the removal of beliefs and fears.

Coming now to the Sceptics, S. Sienkiewicz argues that the sceptic’s art as we find it in Sextus Empiricus can be categorized among the less systematized types of expertise, such as sculpting and painting. In these cases, the expert does not have a grasp of an organized body of propositions. Like sculpting and painting, the sceptical ‘art’ is not grounded in the “grasp of a systematic body of truths,” but comes about with “practice, sensitivity, and experience” (p. 244). To illustrate this point, Sienkiewicz focuses on the mode of disagreement and shows that the sceptic is first a chronicler of disagreement in that he simply points to some relevant disagreement over a certain claim. Second, as a creator of disagreement, he creates an undecided disagreement between himself and the dogmatist. In either case, his art does not involve him having a full grasp of universal generalizations and chains of reasons. The art of the sceptic does not possess systematicity, for its subject matter lacks coherence and depends on the dialectical context. Thus, the sceptic ability, despite coming close to being a τέχνη due to its usefulness, is not susceptible to the same mistrust that is reserved by Sextus in M. 1–6 towards disciplines purporting to describe reality, such as geometry and arithmetic.

Moving to the chapters primarily concerned with τέχνη as a form of knowledge, U. Coope and R. Bolton focus on Aristotle alone. Coope deals with the relationship between productive knowledge and scientific understanding (ἐπιστήμη). Readers might be familiar with τέχνη and ἐπιστήμη differing in their goals, one being production and the other being contemplation. However, Coope brings to the surface an equally important yet understudied consequence of this difference: unlike scientific understanding, productive science does not involve explanations of everything within the scope of that science; thus, it is extendable and requires a special kind of creativity. Craftsmen need not possess a complete knowledge but should have the “capacity to work out new explanations, as the circumstances demand” (p. 128). Unlike natural scientists, they must practice and use perceptual ability, as well as apply it to an unlimited scope which includes exceptional cases and non-ideal circumstances.

Bolton’s chapter concentrates on the relationship between productive knowledge and experience (ἐμπειρία). His contribution, too, has the virtue of dealing with a well-studied topic without falling prey to repetition and lack of novelty. Indeed, he argues that Aristotle’s rationalistic conception of τέχνη, modelled after scientific knowledge, is only one possible mode of τέχνη. By resorting to texts other than Met. 1.1 and NE VI.6, such as the Topics, he argues that Aristotle also envisions a non-scientific mode of τέχνη, closer to experience and more practically oriented. Dialectic is a τέχνη insofar as its successful procedures can be reduced to a teachable system for regular practice, but it is a non-scientific mode of it to the extent that its subject matter is “everything that is” (p. 156), thus lacking a proper γένος.

Turning to the relationship between productive knowledge and cosmology, we first find T. K. Johansen’s chapter on the making of the cosmos in Plato’s Timaeus. Instead of focusing on the Demiurge alone, the chapter distinguishes between the Demiurge’s craft, which creates the heavenly bodies, and the craft of the lesser gods, who are in charge of creating mortal beings by imitating the creative act of the Demiurge. Although the two kinds of craft are similar in that they both make something better out of the materials they find, they differ in that they have different objects or products. Moreover, the craft of the god binds elements together proportionally so as to make an unbreakable unity, whereas the lesser gods can only make less durable unities. Since the Demiurge is a craftsman whose aim is to make something better out of the materials, how can he make “a product that is worse than he is capable of” (p. 88)? Johansen usefully labels this issue ‘Technodicy’ and solves it by distinguishing, on the one hand, the crafts of the Demiurge and that of the lesser gods and, on the other, between creation according to the craft model and creation according to a biological model. According to the former model, the Demiurge is a craftsman; according to the latter model, the Demiurge is a father. God as a father cannot create mortal creatures because he can only make something like himself, i. e., the lesser gods with their immortality. God as a craftsman can only make an image of himself; thus the lesser gods only enjoy a contingent immortality. The lesser gods are only craftsmen, however. As craftsmen, they take care of the greater good of the whole in the best possible way, by creating humans and making them responsible for the creation of non-human animals through reincarnation. As non-fathers, however, their products fail to be like them, i. e., they are mortal.

The figure of the Demiurge as a divine craftsman and his making of the cosmos as a deliberate act of temporal creation almost disappears in Plotinus. E. K. Emilsson’s chapter, however, demonstrates that Plotinus does not completely reject the craft model. For Plotinus, Aristotle’s notorious claim in Phys. II.1 that art does not deliberate is crucial; the art of world-making is effortless to the point that it requires no deliberation. Still, Plotinus adopts the craft model by comparing the art of world-making to the performative art of dancing. The world-making flows from higher principles in an analogous manner to performative arts, where the artist does not deliberate but immediately enacts what she has in mind, simply translating what she sees into movement.

Thanks to J. Opsomer’s chapter, we understand that Proclus seems to reintroduce the craft model pervasively, for various kinds of τέχναι are used for various levels of divine production of the cosmos. Crafts in the divine realm are only analogous to human crafts, as they have their name based on the powers that are also in play in the human crafts: the divine weaving is merely analogous to the human power of weaving. After carefully describing the levels of the Intellect, the Demiurge, and the daemons, Opsomer moves to understand human production. Human craftsmen follow paradigms, too, which are not higher forms, or Platonic ones, but still exist ἐν τῇ διανοίᾳ as rational formulae (λόγοι). One fascinating consequence is that such paradigms are not eternal and not every soul has them. The primus inventor can, indeed, create a new model by first recognizing a need and then modelling a paradigm through imagination. Opsomer contends that the main disanalogy between divine and human production concerns creativity. As the need for innovation stems from deficiency, creativity cannot be ascribed to the divine Intellect. Thus, creativity enters the picture only with the rational souls of daemons and humans.

The book keeps its promises and makes a worthy contribution to the literature. It reflects the richness of the notion of τέχνη by providing a sufficiently wide look on the different kinds of τέχναι and how philosophers exploited them to make philosophically crucial points, as for instance in the case of Protagoras with the medical expertise or Plotinus with performative arts. The complexity of the concept is reinforced by the scrutiny placed on traditional interpretations. In so doing, the volume also touches on issues of contemporary relevance, such as the nature of expertise and creativity. In this way the book offers reliable analyses of τέχνη while also venturing into a number of its understudied aspects.