Title: Craft and the Utopia of Work
Abstract:
One conception of Utopia is of a society in which work reliably serves the common good, being both beneficial in its results and rewarding for the workers. The ancient version of this conception centres on the idea of a political society as organized around the reciprocal practice of the crafts, and emphasises that to produce the common good the crafts must be regulated by political wisdom. By comparing the Utopias of Work developed by Plato, Aristotle, and William Morris, we can get a better sense of what the orientation of craft-practice to the good would mean for work and society.
Bio:
Rachel Barney is Canada Research Chair in Ancient Philosophy at the University of Toronto, where she teaches in the Departments of both Philosophy and Classics. She was educated at the University of Toronto (BA 1989) and Princeton (Phd 1995), and has also taught at the University of Chicago, University of Ottawa, Harvard, Princeton, and McGill. A specialist in ancient Greek philosophy, she has published a book on Plato’s Cratylus, and papers on topics including Platonic and Aristotelian ethics, the sophistic movement, Hellenistic philosophy, and Neoplatonic commentary. She is currently writing a book on the ancient sophist Protagoras. She also is working on a project on Plato’s political ideas in the Republic, based on the Nellie Wallace Lectures given at Oxford University in 2022, and on the revised version of her Tanner Lectures, on the concept of craft [technê], given at UC Berkeley in April 2024.
