This chapter examines how movable renderings of animals contributed to sociopolitical experience in Minoan Crete, with close attention to zoomorphic vessels. Beginning in the Prepalatial period, we examine a group of clay body-form vessels that could stand independently. While typically labelled “anthropomorphic,” the vessels’ identities are more complex: their forms do not neatly suggest a particular species, and their affordances as objects are integral to what they are and how they are experienced. Through analysis of their unique corporeal characters and depositional circumstances, I argue that these figures could have been experienced as distinct productive agents, who participated in cultivating community space between Prepalatial tombs and settlements. Next, looking forward, we consider how animalian vessels continued to contribute to Cretan social venues, while subtle changes to how they embodied animals could imply profound shifts in their presence and performance. From the late Protopalatial, we see rhyta rendered as bodiless animal heads, most bovine. Unlike the Prepalatial vessels, these appeared dramatically dependent on living people to become productive, placing emphasis on human action. I contextualize these rhyta with a problematization of palatial-era politico-environmental developments and changes in social performance and “cattle culture.”

In ‘Aristotle on the Stages of Cognitive Development’, Thomas Kjeller Johansen examines Aristotle’s contributions to our thinking about concepts from a different perspective, namely in connection to Aristotle’s psychology. He revisits Aristotle’s account of how we acquire universal concepts mainly on the basis of Metaphysics A.1, Posterior Analytics 1.31 and 2.19, and the De Anima. The chapter begins by articulating the following puzzle. On the one hand, Aristotle points out (An. Post. 1.31, 2.19) that we perceive the universal in the particular. On the other, he suggests (Metaph. A.1) that it is only when we have craft and science that we grasp the universal, while perception, memory, and experience all are concerned with the particular. Building on the widespread view that, according to Aristotle, the universal grasped in craft and science is the universal cause, Johansen argues that we should understand perception, memory, and experience teleologically, as stages in the ordering of perceptual information that allows this causal concept to emerge.

Human beings become scarcer than before in the simile world of the Aeneid, contributing to a tale about the loneliness and sorrow of human beings who struggle to connect with each other or to affect the world around them. Both Aeneas and the characters in the simile world are marked by solitude and isolation. The human characters in the simile world of the Aeneid share few strong ties with other creatures, and they often fail to affect the world around them in ways that their fellows in Greek epic would take for granted. In the story world, similes highlight moments of furor, the overpowering rage that underlies both love and war and threatens not simply Aeneas’ mission to found Rome but also the existence of a rational world order. Similes draw out isolation and overwhelming passion as two poles of emotion in the poem with little in between. They use new storytelling techniques that appear rarely or not at all in the similes of earlier epics, and they often lack an exit expression joining a simile to the story. These features weaken the conventional distinctions between similes and other components of epic narrative.

The simile world of Homer’s Odyssey is teeming with human connections, and family relationships play a central role. This distinctive aspect of the simile world of the Odyssey helps to tell the poem’s tale of human relationships, the burden of sorrow when they are disrupted, and the heroic task of keeping relationships alive through danger, separation, and loss. The Odyssey is not just about Odysseus’ homecoming but also homecoming itself. How do we know when we are truly “home”? What if we reach our home, but we cannot return there? What are the costs of a long absence, both for the person who returns and for those who remain at home? In what way can homecoming be considered a form of heroism? What complex mixture of feelings accompanies a long-awaited return home? The intertwined gladness and sorrow that defines the Odyssey’s tale of homecoming arises from the characters and incidents of the simile world at least as much as from the story of Odysseus and from the process of integrating the two more than from either sort of narrative individually.

Evidence-based policing (EBP) is perhaps the most significant police reform movement of the last 30 years. Most notable for identifying what does or does not work, and for trying to integrate science into policing, much of EBP’s focus remains on program evaluation methods and investigating crime prevention strategies. This vision for policing often characterizes the craft of police work as an obstacle rather than a useful contributor to science. This is changing, as proponents of EBP begin to embrace a wider variety of methods to assess a broader range of outcomes, and to treat both science and experience as necessary elements of successful police reform. In this chapter, we recommend that EBP focus more attention on assessing the choices that patrol officers make in their everyday encounters with the public. Drawing on a case study of a neighbor dispute, we show how EBP could benefit from listening to practioners and learning what their rich experiences have taught them about how best to respond. We also suggest ways that research might help generate knowledge on the essential normative or moral questions that characterize street-level discretion, and thus combine knowledge about what works with knowledge about doing the right thing.

The products of Artefaction are not just made things but making things. Included in this class are tangible things with a capacity for rhetorical performance – for example a statue or a flag – as well as intangible things, of which the preeminent example is the word. Where words combine in sentences and in speech, they can attain monumental status and influence. Contemplating Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, in which Burke argued that a word like ‘freedom’ is only as good as the use to which it is put, Richard Dawson observes that for Burke, words are ‘evolving cultural artefacts that shape us and are shaped by us as we use them’. This serves as an excellent definition of the Making Sense informing the term ‘Artefaction’ as it is used in this chapter, as does James Boyd White’s idea (as summarized by Dawson) that language is ‘an evolving cultural artefact for making and remaking ourselves and our world – the real world’. In defence of ‘underwater basket weaving’, this chapter turns to material culture to consider the relationship between the weaving of words and such handcrafts as the weaving of baskets.

Jeffrey Gore’s entry on technē offers a survey of diverse workers throughout Shakespeare’s writing: artisans, lawyers, medical doctors, and educators. It situates the Greek word technē – meaning “technical expertise,” “craft,” or “skill” – within Aristotle’s intellectual virtues in the Nicomachean Ethics as both a pedagogical model (“the craft analogy”) and a marker of social class among different laborers, from “leather apron” craftspeople to elite Latin learners and modern teachers of the liberal arts. In brief accounts of Hannah Arendt’s and Alasdair MacIntyre’s writings on Aristotle, the entry addresses how technē was often believed incompatible with some ancient and early modern notions of citizenship and demonstrates how many of Shakespeare’s characters – such as the “rude mechanicals” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream – challenge us to understand the role of craft in facilitating artistic expression and strengthening political community.

This collection brings together an international group of scholars to address an expansive range of small things, paying close attention, for the first time, to the rich interaction between scale and the body. Offering an intimate history of how small things were used, handled, and worn, this collection shows how entangled small things, such as mugs, buttons, and buckles, were with quotidian practices and rituals of bodily care. Small objects, such as tiny books, ceramic trinkets, toothpick cases, and patch boxes, could delight and entertain, generating tactile pleasures for users, and also at the same time signaling the limits of the body’s adeptness or the hand’s dexterity. The volume also explores the mobility of small things: how fans, coins, rings, and pottery could, for instance, carry into circumscribed spaces political, philosophical, and cultural concepts; and how small items, tea caddies, wampum beads, and drawings of ants for example, were shaped by empire and contributed to Enlightenment systems of knowledge production. From the decorative and playful to the useful and performative, small things negotiated larger political, cultural, and scientific shifts as they transported aesthetic and cultural practices across borders, via nationalist imagery, gift exchange, and the movement of global colonial goods.

This chapter examines the complex physical relations that characterized a range of eighteenth-century literary, visual, and material objects that attached small fragments together into a new larger form. Arguing that these created a dynamic dialogue of part and whole, it explores how the process of joining allowed small fragments, displayed and placed together, to materialize emotional connection. It focuses on four key material forms: the production of herbaria; a series of collaged stained-glass windows at Plas Newydd, the home of the “Ladies of Llangollen,” Lady Eleanor Butler (1739–1829) and Sarah Ponsonby (1755–1831), in Llangollen, North Wales; the interior decoration and furnishings of A la Ronde, in Exmouth, Devon, home to cousins Jane and Mary Parminter (1750–1811 and 1767–1849); and the creation of eighteenth-century patchwork.

The large body of surviving poetry and prose from medieval Wales contains many references to the performance and practice of music, to musical instruments and to the reception of musical events by both noble and urban audiences. The medieval Welsh word for music, cerdd, also signifies ‘craft’, ‘song’, ‘poetry’ or ‘musical instrument’, indicating the close links between music, poetry and the craft of making instruments. It also indicates that both music and poetry were regarded as a type of professional craft, moderated by their own particular standards and hierarchies. The commonest entertainments offered at the courts of the nobility in medieval Wales were poetry, storytelling and music, and these three arts were closely intertwined. Well-known examples include the poem by Dafydd ap Gwilym (c.1325–60) to his beloved as she plays the harp, while other references can be found in the prose tales of the Mabinogion. However, the private entertainments of the nobility and gentry were not the only occasions for the performance of music; travelling minstrels also performed in the streets of towns and at local fairs. This chapter examines a range of such references to music, performers and instruments in medieval Welsh literature, looking at the different kinds of entertainers, their professional hierarchies, the patronage of nobility and gentry and the popular entertainments characteristic of urban culture.

The dominant genre of secular music in medieval Wales was cerdd dant (literally ‘string craft’), a highly distinctive repertory played on the harp or crwth. Its delivery relied on highly trained professional instrumentalists, who worked in close partnership with Welsh strict-metre poets: both crafts were an intrinsic part of Welsh medieval ‘high culture’, linked to an exclusive bardic order. Though largely transmitted orally, some thirty items from the repertory were entabulated by the Anglesey harper Robert ap Huw c.1613. Cerdd dant largely retained its status until the 1560s, when the fashion for acquiring an English education gradually brought about a sea change in musical taste, effected by the importation of English tunes, texts, instruments and books. Some of the Welsh nobility nevertheless retained a loyalty to the practitioners of the traditional bardic crafts well into the seventeenth century, resulting in a mixed economy in some households, where vernacular music and poetry might rub shoulders with the latest English-style entertainments.

In the Hippias Minor, Socrates argues that the expert in a given domain is the one in a position to voluntarily violate the rules of that domain. For example, the expert archer can ensure that her arrows miss the target, whereas the novice archer might accidentally hit the target she’s trying to miss. Socrates claims, shockingly, that this point holds for justice as well: it is the expert in justice who will have the power to deliberately act unjustly. Though some accuse Socrates of drawing this conclusion on the basis of uncritical reliance on the craft analogy, I argue that in fact Socrates is identifying common ground between a variety of forms of practical normativity. In any activity that can be assessable as going well or badly, those who intentionally flout the norm, by erring on purpose, are better at it than those who unintentially flub the norm, by erring accidentally. Socrates’ argument places powerrather than the exercise of powerat the heart of ethics. The Hippias Minor shows why Socratic ethics is an ethics of virtue, rather than an ethics of virtue activation.

This chapter highlights the close interconnection between cosmology and human nature in the Timaeus. According to Timaeus, human beings are not merely part of the cosmos; they play a crucial role in explaining how the cosmos came to be. The cosmos must contain three kinds of mortal beings in order to be complete, and all three derive from human beings, as a result of varying degrees of moral and cognitive failure. Recognizing the distinctive role human beings play in completing the cosmos complicates the standard picture of Timaeus’ cosmology, as well as his account of human nature. While in large part the cosmos is a product of divine craft, in some part it is the product of the inevitable disturbance of immortal souls due to mortal embodiment. Human beings have a special status as the first generation of mortal beings, as well as the only ones produced solely by divine craft. However, this distinction does not extend beyond the first generation, nor does it include any women. Ultimately, Timaeus’ account of human nature blurs the lines between humans and gods, as well as between humans and non-human animals.

This chapter addresses Plato’s conception of philosophy by examining how the Apology of Socrates represents Socrates as a model lover of wisdom. This Socrates loves expertise about how to live well, and he does so in three ways: (i) by examining others to test them for this expertise and to confirm that only the gods possess it, (ii) by pursuing the expertise, nonetheless, to improve his beliefs about how to live well, and (iii) by exhorting others to examine themselves and to pursue wisdom. The chapter pays special attention to Socrates’ conceptions of knowledge, living well, and teaching, and it suggests briefly how Plato tweaks or transforms this Socratic model in other dialogues.

Chapter 2 establishes the context usually neglected by histories of agricultural literature: how farming was learned without books in the prevailing system of knowledge in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It examines the discourse on the ‘mystery of husbandry’ (and closely associated discourse of ‘secrets’), a term denoting the knowledge and skills acquired by experienced practitioners that were inaccessible to amateurs, to both elucidate contemporary beliefs about learning through labour and to indicate the ways in which the publication of husbandry manuals disrupted existing notions of expertise. In doing so, it explores the parallels between craft and farming knowledge and borrows ideas from modern studies to argue that early modern husbandmen and housewives would have possessed a ‘peasant epistemology’ analogous to an ‘artisanal epistemology’. The chapter argues that when linked to broader socio-economic changes in farming, the emergence of the term ‘mystery of husbandry’ in the seventeenth century can be seen as a symptom of tectonic shifts in the social system of agricultural knowledge. In short, the knowledge of husbandry was being commodified in an increasingly competitive commercial environment.