Faculty Fellow Lecture Series: Will Small

The Institute for the Humanities presents the Faculty Fellow Lecture Series with Will Small, associate professor of philosophy, on “Skill as Practical Knowledge.”

The claim that skill (or “know-how”) is a kind of practical knowledge has a long history —going back at least to Aristotle — and may seem so obvious as to be a platitude. But there are different things it can mean. After distinguishing several of them, Small sketches a conception of skill according to which it is a distinctively practical form of knowledge, explains some of the philosophical attractions of this conception and indicates how it differs from, and its theoretical advantages over, the “intellectualist” and“anti-intellectualist” conceptions of skill that are dominant in contemporary philosophy.

Small is an associate professor in the UIC Department of Philosophy. He works in the philosophy of action, epistemology and ethics. He aims to articulate what we can understand about agency by virtue of the fact that we ourselves are agents — our agential understanding of agency.

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