Digital Commons@RISD Home > Division of Liberal Arts > Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive) > Vol. 21 (2023)
Abstract
In the course of her exposition of the sense of taste, Sarah Worth argues that taste can provide a purely sensuous, aesthetic kind of knowledge that is rooted in bodily sensation, in contrast to the information-gathering provided by the distance senses of vision and hearing. As such, taste experience is also independent of propositional knowledge. I argue that, on the contrary, taste is not only multimodal but its full operation is also dependent on certain ongoing cognitive conditions. Although Worth declares that there is no such thing as an aesthetic obligation, her defense of the importance of taste actually suggests the opposite. If we care about tastes, then perhaps we also ought to care for them and their preservation, indicating that there might be aesthetic obligations after all.