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This chapter gives substance to the idea of a ‘communitarian value-driven epistemology’ by developing and combining ideas from Edward Craig's and Bernard Williams' ‘epistemic genealogy’ and Barry Barnes' and Steven Shapin's ‘sociology of knowledge’. In order to make transparent how this project might slot into more familiar, or more mainstream, projects, the paper maintains throughout a critical dialogue with Jon Kvanvig's position. The chapter is structured around an attempt to defend Craig's position against Kvanvig's criticisms: by treating the institution of testimony as a collective good underwritten by the intrinsic and interrelated values of accuracy and sincerity; by rendering protoknowledge attributions as ascriptions of honour; and by allowing attributions of protoknowledge to be intertwined with attributions of freedom. The view that emerges is that the core of our knowledge practices comprises institutions of testimony, and that these practices are a collective good.

This chapter tells three parallel stories about William Shakespeare's Hamlet, each of which could fit under the general rubric of “Hamlet, Repetition, and Revenge.” It begins with Edward Gordon Craig and his complicated relation to the play, then moves on to a story about the scholar John Dover Wilson (the textual editor of the Cranach Hamlet), and finally to another story involving a literary scholar, J. I. M. Stewart, who, moonlighting as detective novelist “Michael Innes,” was the author of a mystery called Hamlet, Revenge! Each of these inset narratives turns on a book: a book that incarnates the idea of Hamlet—the play—as repetition and revenge. The chapter argues that there are times when revenge takes the form of homage, and homage takes the form of revenge. It also suggests that there is something about Hamlet—the Hamlet effect—that not only generates this cycle, but also, ultimately, casts the play itself in the position of the revenger.

Salome was a source of fascination for the poet and playwright W. B. Yeats, appearing in his poetry, letters, memoirs, and plays. Examining Wilde’s often underplayed influence on Yeats, this chapter considers Yeats’s subtle yet persistent engagement with the image of Salome’s dance as a constitutive element of his broader ambition to incorporate choreography into his theatrical projects, otherwise known as his ‘plays for dancers’. This chapter explores how Yeats’s revisions of the Salomean figure in the plays At the Hawk’s Well (1916), The King of the Great Clock Tower (1934) and The Death of Cuchulain (1939) shaped his approach to stage space, modernist dramaturgy, Symbolist themes, stage pictures, and the depersonalisation of the performer, shaped by his collaborations with the practitioners Edward Gordon Craig, Michio Ito, and Ninette de Valois.

The second interchapter examines discussions of Russian theatre in Britain. In a period of transition for British theatre, there was a call to look abroad for inspiration. This interchapter reviews the obstacles to the development of an art theatre movement in Britain, and details three potential conduits of Russian innovations in staging and design: Edward Gordon Craig’s collaboration with the Moscow Art Theatre, the staging of Russian symbolist plays by Edith Craig’s Pioneer Players, and the journalism of Huntly Carter, whose many articles on theatre, opera, art, ballet, and—after the war—film, promoted a ‘new spirit’ in the avant-garde, which he increasingly located in Russia.

This chapter examines Edward Gordon Craig's theatre journals: The Mask and The Marionette. Both titles recorded and inflected much of the radical climate on the various European stages from Max Reinhardt to Konstantin Stanislavsky, Isadora Duncan, and W. B. Yeats. They also provided Craig with a platform on and through which he could refine and expand his own visionary ideas for the new ‘Art of the Theatre’.

In the opening chapter of Enterprise of Knowledge, written by the same author as this book, it was argued that characterizing knowledge as true full belief gave expression to an epistemic ideal that, so it was claimed, Peirce and James had suggested. An inquirer’s full beliefs serve as his or her standard for serious possibility. Such a standard ought to be as informative as the budget of inquiries in which the inquirer is engaged and be free of error. Not only was pedigree epistemology jettisoned, but a conception of knowledge tied to the function of knowledge in inquiry proposed. In the 1990s, Edward Craig and Philip Kitcher proposed accounts of knowledge that appealed to another function beliefs can have in inquiry—as a source of reliable information. This chapter explains the difference between these views of the function of knowledge, argues for the view that knowledge is true full belief, and reviews a few other contemporary accounts of knowledge.

The Abbey Theatre aimed to touch all Irish life. During the second decade of the 20th century, Ms. Horniman has left the company and J. M. Synge died, leaving Yeats and Lady Gregory to take hold of theatre management. Edward Gordon Craig, a famous stage designer, created a set of screens for the Abbey, to create atmospheric effect. These screens were first used for the revival of Yeats' The Hour Glass and Lady Gregory's The Deliverer. More plays were hosted at the Abbey, including King Argimenes and the Unknown Warrior and Mixed Marriage. Moved by The Countess Cathleen while visiting England, Yeats met with its creator, Nugent Monck, believing that he could bring grace, vigour, and vitality to the Abbey. Working with the Abbey Theatre company, Monck was given freedom to build his own school in acting, elocution, gesture, and deportment. The Abbey School of Acting produced plays, such as The Interlude of Youth. Yeats and the main company travelled to the USA to present The Playboy to the American audience. It was presented in Boston on the 16th of October, and was well received.

This chapter proves that even some the smallest little magazines can be read as portfolios for the artists and authors who produced them. The critical success of the Hobby Horse (see Chapter 2) encouraged the foundation of the coterie publication the Dial (1889–97) by Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, struggling artists who used this periodical to obtain publicity for themselves and a select set of participating friends (incl. ‘Michael Field’, John Gray, Thomas Sturge Moore, Lucien Pissarro). Intriguingly theorized along the lines of the Mallarméan Livre, the Dial also functioned as a means of promoting the artistic crafts of engraving and typography. The single issue of the Pagan Review (1892) was written entirely by William Sharp under various pseudonyms, corresponding to different personae that presented different facets of the magazine’s titular ‘paganism’ and allowed the author to test out different styles and themes for possible future writing projects. The whimsical Page (1898–1901) of Edward Gordon Craig, who would become a leading designer for the modernist stage, was another (nearly) single-authored publication. Craig primarily used it to advertise his services as a designer of bookplates, dinner menus and other forms of artistic printing.

Craig propounds a broad method and within it a strategy for arriving at an elucidation of concepts, and proposes an account of our concept of knowledge—KNOWS—developed through his own implementation of that strategy. According to Craig our concept KNOWS has evolved from an earlier more subjective concept first introduced to meet a need to ‘flag good sources of information’. This chapter argues against Craig: the account of KNOWS that his implementation of his strategy yields is shown to be incorrect; his reductive-historical implementation of his broad method in relation to KNOWS is shown to be incoherent. The final section sketches a non-reductive current-role account of KNOWS, revealing the two links that constrain the epistemic standards for satisfying KNOWS: first, that it is the norm governing assertion; second, that it is the standard for practical reasoning leading to action. These are two aspects of the same fact.

This chapter examines the concepts of expression and affect in the works of Heinrich von Kleist, Samuel Beckett, and Gilles Deleuze. It suggests that Kleist, Beckett, and Edward Gordon-Craig belong a minor tradition of acting and explains that this minor tradition is one that aims to create a theatre which moves away from the inner world of an actor in favour of developing affects which express an external composite world. It also analyses Kleist's short story ‘On the Marionette Theatre’ and Deleuze's Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza.

This introductory chapter proceeds in three parts. The first section characterizes the general approach to epistemology around which the volume revolves—purposeful epistemology—and examines the general motivation for that approach. The guiding idea is that considerations about the point and purpose of epistemic evaluation might fruitfully constrain epistemological theory and yield insights for epistemological reflection. The second section explores the approach by characterizing some important versions of it. Several themes and issues that we see running through the volume are here articulated and highlighted. The third section provides a brief summary of each contribution to the collection.

The teleological approach to understanding an epistemic concept asks questions like ‘what is the purpose of the concept?’, ‘what role has it played?’, or ‘if we imagine a society without the concept, what would it lack?’ The idea behind the teleological approach is that examining the function of a concept illuminates the phenomenon the concept picks out. This chapter explains the teleological approach. First, the approach is contrasted with more orthodox approaches in epistemology. Second, three specific kinds of teleological approaches are distinguished, and an example of each kind is provided. The teleological approach in general is often viewed as antithetical to more orthodox approaches, and so in competition with them. This chapter argues, by contrast, that all these methods can be fruitfully combined in epistemological theorizing. The chapter ends by suggesting specific ways that the teleological approach can be incorporated alongside more orthodox approaches within a general philosophical method.

Can we learn something interesting about knowledge by examining our concept of knowledge? Quite a bit, many argue. It is argued here that the concept of knowledge is of little epistemological interest. This chapter critically examines one interesting defense of the view that the concept of knowledge is of great epistemological interest: Edward Craig’s Knowledge and the State of Nature. Craig argues that a proper understanding of knowledge is achieved by a distinctive form of conceptual investigation. On his view, the concept of knowledge is tied in an important way to that of a reliable informant. A minimalist view of concepts is presented and defended where there is little value to be found in examining our concept of knowledge. Along the way, considerations to do with the social construction of concepts and of knowledge itself are discussed, as well as the view that knowledge is a natural kind.

This chapter provides a preliminary statement and defense of the book’s central hypothesis, namely: the purpose of the concept of knowledge is to identify reliable informants. This hypothesis is used to yield a systematic account of knowledge and knowledge claims. We start with the idea of an individual inquirer who needs an informant to satisfy her own need for information; then we imagine a more complex situation in which a community of individuals collaborate to pool and share information. As our interest in information becomes more socially directed, it becomes vital that we identify individuals who are sufficiently reliable for members of our community. After outlining this thought, this chapter defends it from objections. For example, what should we say about people who seem not to qualify as reliable informants and yet clearly have knowledge? Also, does this view lead to skepticism? And doesn’t all this rely on dubious quasi-historical postulations? This chapter provides answers to these (and other) questions.

This introductory chapter outlines the main aim of the book, which is to reveal the nature, purpose, and significance of knowledge by investigating why humans think and speak of knowing. Hannon calls this “function-first epistemology.” At the core of this book are two broad proposals. First, we can make progress in epistemology by taking a function-first approach. Second, the function of the concept of knowledge is to identify reliable informants (a practice that is vital for human survival, cooperation, and flourishing). These ideas are borrowed from Edward Craig’s genealogy of knowledge, but Hannon also highlights some important differences between these two approaches. After situating “function-first epistemology” within the broader theoretical context, a summary of each chapter is provided. The introduction ends by encouraging scholars to apply this “function-first” methodology to other areas of philosophy.

The chapter rehearses the main outlines of gatekeeping contextualism—the view that it is central to the concept of knowledge that attributions of knowledge function in a kind of epistemic gatekeeping for contextually salient communities. The case for gatekeeping contextualism is clarified within an extended discussion of the character of philosophical reflection. The chapter argues that normatively valenced, evaluative concepts constitute a broad class of concepts for which a sociolinguistic point or purpose may be readily sensed—and for which the intimate connection between point/purpose and the concept itself is readily understandable. Commonly at the inception of philosophical reflection one’s sense for the point or purpose of a specific concept is seldom highly articulate. The chapter argues that this does not prevent one’s grasp of point/purpose from doing real work in philosophical reflection.