Simona Aimar

Doctors heal people, and architects build houses. Their expertise guides them in their performance. Aristotle calls this expertise a technē. He often tells us that technē comes with a productive form of knowledge (poiētikē epistēmē). But what kind of knowledge does he associate with technē? We argue that for Aristotle technical knowledge is scientific knowledge—knowledge that can be modeled in terms of demonstrations. The view we develop enjoys several explanatory advantages over alternative interpretations and shows how Aristotle’s conception of technical knowledge is consistent throughout his metaphysics, philosophy of science, and ethics.

Doctors heal people, and architects build houses. Their expertise guides them in their performance. Aristotle calls this expertise a technē. He often tells us that technē comes with a productive form of knowledge (poiētikē epistēmē). But what kind of knowledge does he associate with technē? We argue that for Aristotle technical knowledge is scientific knowledge—knowledge that can be modeled in terms of demonstrations. The view we develop enjoys several explanatory advantages over alternative interpretations and shows how Aristotle’s conception of technical knowledge is consistent throughout his metaphysics, philosophy of science, and ethics.

The Exclusion Problem for mental causation suggests that there is a tension between the claim that the mental causes physical effects, and the claim that the mental does not overdetermine its physical effects. In response, Karen Bennett puts forward an extra necessary condition for overdetermination : if one candidate cause were to occur but the other were not to occur, the effect would still occur. She thus denies one of the assumptions of EP, the assumption that if an effect has two sufficient causes, it is overdetermined. If sound, her argument does two things: it solves EP, and it shows how to use counterfactuals in order to make the notion of overdetermination precise. However, the argument is not sound