We live in a technocratic culture. We worship at the altar of technology. Our lives are increasingly shaped by the machinations of the techies. It is vital, therefore, for all of us to think hard about the role the technical plays in our lives.

Postmodernism - and is that term used much any more? - is simply a reiteration of the sophistic or the rhetorical worldview.

What makes defeat so painful is just the awareness that the other has won. It hurts to lose because it feels so good to win.

Even before Plato, techne was conceived as knowledge of a determinate field that could be mastered by "the expert". Such a person becomes an authority to whom laypersons should, in their dealings with that field, defer. Techne typically results in a useful result.

If you want to understand what it means to be afraid, what fear as experienced by human beings is, then your focus must shift. No longer will you be satisfied with mechanical, physiological, neurological accounts. For this inquiry will require you to observe closely what human beings feel, sing, think, write and say to one another.

It may well seem that Plato does suggest techne is the best model for moral knowledge. In other words, it may seem that his goal is to establish an expert or authority in the field of the good-bad, just-unjust.

In our lives a dog is a dog rather than a former wolf, and it surely is not a cat, a difference that means an enormous amount to some people.