Digital Commons@RISD Home > Division of Liberal Arts > Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive) > Vol. 21 (2023)
Abstract
This book has been such a labor of love for me; I cannot thank my commentators enough for taking this work seriously and giving such thoughtful feedback. Carolyn Korsmeyer, Deborah Knight, and Alexandra Plakias were willing not only to do an author-meets-critic session but to develop their thoughts further into these papers. I could not receive higher praise as a philosopher than serious consideration. The primary claim of my book is about the ways in which gustatory taste should be taken more seriously, especially as a form of knowledge. I approach this suggestion not from the historical sense of taste Hume and Kant gave us, but rather from eating itself, and the pleasure and cultivation of taste that happens when we pay close attention to what and how we eat. I take much of my own knowledge about this from spending time in Italy studying and teaching about the Slow Food movement. In her remarks, Korsmeyer suggests that I address the possibility of aesthetic obligations that might result from the ways that standardized or industrialized food is replacing heirloom varieties and tastes. Knight focuses on “taste bombs” and synthetic tastes that have infected our food supply, which make us overeat. Plakias shows how gastronomy-as-epistemology might go wrong, and how it might lead us to some “aesthetic injustices.” I try to address these questions in turn, but thankfully there are lots of overlaps in the topics. I appreciate the opportunity here to further my own thinking about eating and epistemology.