At first glance it seems that there are no activities more different from each other than technique and art: one is associated with foresight and calculation, the instrument, the series and reproducibility; the other, with creativity and the absence of ends, the gift, the unrepeatable originality. However, both have a common root in the "téchne" of the Greeks, and are children of the metaphysical temptation of the West. In this volume, Massimo Cacciari and Massimo Doná focus on the ambiguity of human "doing" from the tragic condition of mortals and the terrible gifts of Prometheus, the titan who rebelled before Zeus to benefit men, in a journey that goes from myth to science, from Aeschylus to Heidegger, from Bacon to Popper. All knowledge is "tragedy": to get out of its powerful entanglement, the "free profession" of art is usually summoned, that subtle and disinterested component that, perhaps, will allow us to escape from the prisons that technology, with its astonishing successes, is today. building.