Abstract: Techne (craft, skill, expertise) plays a central role in Plato’s philosophy, including in his celebrated “skill analogy for virtue,” wherein the crafts are the model for the kind of practical rationality employed in moral activity. This talk concerns a debate in the interpretation of this analogy: are the crafts, as such, defined as having good ends? I’ll argue they are not—in other words, the crafts of the pirate and the influencer are just as much crafts as those of the engineer and the doctor. The focus will be on Plato, but the topic will give us material for reflecting on rationality, work, and normativity more generally, as well as the place of techne in Greek culture more broadly.
