The analogy between gustatory taste and critical or aesthetic taste plays a recurring role in the history of aesthetics. Our interest in this article is in a particular way in which gustatory judgments are frequently thought to be analogous to critical judgments. It appears obvious to many that to know how a particular object tastes we must have tasted it for ourselves; the proof of the pudding, we are all told, is in the eating. And it (...) has seemed just as obvious to many philosophers that aesthetic judgment requires first-person experience. In this article we argue that, despite its initial appeal, the claim that gustatory and critical judgments are analogous in this way is mistaken. The two sorts of judgments are, as a matter of fact, similar in their epistemology, but earlier theorists have got things entirely backward—neither gustatory judgment nor aesthetic judgment requires first-hand acquaintance with their objects. Our particular focus in this article is on arguing that first-person experience is not required to know how an item of food or drink tastes. In fact, there are a wide variety of ways in which we can acquire this knowledge. (shrink)

This chapter argues that gustatory properties such as sweetness or saltiness are not proprietary to the sense of taste. Rather, we can maintain the common-sense view that such properties can be smelled as well as tasted.

Can there be a philosophy of taste? This paper opens by raising some metaphilosophical questions about the study of taste – what it consists of and what method we should adopt in pursuing it. It is suggested that the best starting point for philosophising about taste is against the background of 18th-century epistemology and philosophy of mind, and the conceptual tools this new philosophical paradigm entails. The notion of aesthetic taste in particular, which emerges from a (...) growing sense of dissatisfaction with an undifferentiated category of taste, comes to be set apart from gustatory taste on account of its normativity and aspirations to objectivity. The paradox of taste, as found in Hume and Kant, is examined, and shown to be highly relevant to contemporary metaphysical debate within aesthetics. Specifically, this paper argues that both Realists and Anti-Realists rely more heavily than assumed on the idea of taste. (shrink)

This volume offers an original and innovative collection of fresh approaches to the investigation of the idea of taste. It is divided into three sections: the concept of taste; taste and culture; and gustatory taste. The papers in all three parts deal with the way that aesthetics interpenetrates discussions of food, political conflict, art appreciation, aesthetic judgement, and education. These are fresh, never-before published contributions from a range of scholars, using the most recent literature in (...) their areas of expertise. There is no other book available that collects the latest research in this field, and, as such, it represents a key contribution to recent aesthetic, and more broadly philosophical, interest in matters of taste. (shrink)

The sense of taste has served as a governing metaphor for aesthetic discernment for several centuries, and recent philosophical perspectives on this history have invited literal, gustatory taste into aesthetic relevance. This paper summarizes the disposition of taste in aesthetics by means of three stories, the most recent of which considers food in terms of aesthetics and its employment in works of art. I conclude with some reflections on the odd position that taste has achieved (...) in the postmodern art world, and I make a case for the often unnoticed role that bodily senses have in the apprehension of art. (shrink)

In developmental lexical–gustatory synesthesia, specific words can trigger taste perceptions and these synesthetic associations are generally stable. We describe a case of multilingual lexical–gustatory synesthesia for whom some synesthesias were bidirectional as some tastes also triggered auditory word associations. Evoked concurrents could be gustatory but also tactile sensations. In addition to words and pseudowords, many voices were effective inducers, suggesting increased connections between cortical taste areas and both voice-selective and language-selective areas. Lasting changes in some (...) evoked tastes occurred during childhood suggesting that some plasticity can be present after the initial learning of associations. Inducers were often linked to taste concurrents phonologically or semantically, but also through identifiable childhood episodes . Several inducers were phonologically linked to episodic inducers suggesting a process of secondary acquisition for many inducers. Implications of these observations are discussed. (shrink)

We all have different “tastes” for different tastes: some of us have a sweet tooth, while others prefer more subtle flavors; some crave spicy foods, while others cannot stand them. As Bourdieu and others have pointed out, these varying judgments seem to be more than mere preferences; often they reflect (and partially constitute) differences of class and culture. But I want to suggest that we’ve possibly overlooked another important source of these divergent gastronomic evaluations, other than hierarchy and caste: mere (...) interpersonal variability with respect to brute gustatory sensations. After all, we all know about “supertasters and cilantro-haters”; how likely is it, though, that the interpersonal heterogeneity of gustatory sensation is limited to this one dimension? In this paper, I make the case that we should take this possibility more seriously, and offer some thoughts on how we might start getting a better handle on the nature and scope of interpersonal gustatory variability—including by suggesting some diagnostics that can help us get at (what I call) some of the “non-flavor dimensions” of our gustatory experience. I conclude by developing some implications for the prospects of an “alimentary aesthetics”: namely, that—should our gustatory experiences turn out to be quite heterogeneous—then they do not seem well-suited to serve as the basic ingredients of bona fide aesthetic judgment about food and drink. (shrink)

Korsmeyer (philosophy, State U. of New York-Buffalo) disagrees with the centuries of philosophers before her that taste is beneath the dignity of the field. She explores how it gained such a low esteem, parallels between notions of aesthetic and gustatory taste, how the sense works scientifically, the multiple components of the experience, its various meanings in art and literature, and its sacred dimension. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Many experiential properties are naturally understood as dispositions such that e.g. a cake tastes good to you iff you are disposed to get gustatory pleasure when you eat it. Such dispositional analyses, however, face a challenge. It has been widely observed that one cannot properly assert “The cake tastes good to me” unless one has tried it. This acquaintance requirement is puzzling on the dispositional account because it should be possible to be disposed to like the cake even if (...) this disposition has never been manifested. We argue that familiar response strategies on behalf of the dispositionalist fail. These include appeals to conversational implicatures, expressivism, semantic presuppositions and norms of assertion. Against this background, we propose a new analysis in terms of what we call tendencies, where a tendency is a disposition that has been manifested. The acquaintance requirement comes out as an entailment. We point out a hitherto unnoticed parallel to sentences ascribing character traits such as “Hannah is brave,” and extend our tendency-based analysis to this domain. (shrink)

Taste, perhaps the most intimate of the five senses, has traditionally been considered beneath the concern of philosophy, too bound to the body, too personal and idiosyncratic. Yet, in addition to providing physical pleasure, eating and drinking bear symbolic and aesthetic value in human experience, and they continually inspire writers and artists. In Making Sense of Taste, Carolyn Korsmeyer explains how taste came to occupy so low a place in the hierarchy of senses and why it is (...) deserving of greater philosophical respect and attention. Korsmeyer begins with the Greek thinkers who classified taste as an inferior, bodily sense; she then traces the parallels between notions of aesthetic and gustatory taste that were explored in the formation of modern aesthetic theories. She presents scientific views of how taste actually works and identifies multiple components of taste experiences. Turning to taste's objects—food and drink—she looks at the different meanings they convey in art and literature as well as in ordinary human life and proposes an approach to the aesthetic value of taste that recognizes the representational and expressive roles of food. Korsmeyer's consideration of art encompasses works that employ food in contexts sacred and profane, that seek to whet the appetite and to keep it at bay; her selection of literary vignettes ranges from narratives of macabre devouring to stories of communities forged by shared eating. (shrink)

Taste as Experience puts the pleasure of food at the center of human experience. It shows how the sense of taste informs our preferences for and relationship to nature, pushes us toward ethical practices of consumption, and impresses upon us the importance of aesthetics. Eating is often dismissed as a necessary aspect of survival, and our personal enjoyment of food is considered a quirk. Nicola Perullo sees food as the only portion of the world we take in on (...) a daily basis, constituting our first and most significant encounter with the earth. Perullo has long observed people's food practices and has listened to their food experiences. He draws on years of research to explain the complex meanings behind our food choices and the thinking that accompanies our gustatory actions. He also considers our indifference toward food as a force influencing us as much as engagement. For Perullo, taste is value and wisdom. It cannot be reduced to mere chemical or cultural factors but embodies the quality and quantity of our earthly experience. (shrink)

In theoretical work about the language of personal taste, the canonical example is the simple predicate of personal taste, 'tasty'. We can also express the same positive gustatory evaluation with the complex expression, 'taste good'. But there is a challenge for an analysis of 'taste good': While it can be used equivalently with 'tasty', it need not be (for instance, imagine it used by someone who can identify good wines by taste but doesn't enjoy (...) them). This kind of two-faced behavior systematically arises with complex sensory-evaluative predicates, including those with other appearance verbs, such as 'look splendid' and 'sound nice'. I examine two strategies for capturing these different uses: one that posits an ambiguity in appearance verbs, and one that does not. The former is in line with an approach to 'look'-statements prominent in work in philosophy of perception, and I consider how the motivation given in that tradition carries over to the present context. I then show how the data used to support the verbal ambiguity approach can equally be captured on the second strategy, which appeals only to independently-motivated flexibility in adjective meaning. I close by discussing some considerations that are relevant for choosing between the two options. (shrink)

Previous studies have shown that object properties are processed faster when they follow properties from the same perceptual modality than properties from different modalities. These findings suggest that language activates sensorimotor processes, which, according to those studies, can only be explained by a modal account of cognition. The current paper shows how a statistical linguistic approach of word co-occurrences can also reliably predict the category of perceptual modality a word belongs to (auditory, olfactory–gustatory, visual–haptic), even though the statistical linguistic (...) approach is less precise than the modal approach (auditory, gustatory, haptic, olfactory, visual). Moreover, the statistical linguistic approach is compared with the modal embodied approach in an experiment in which participants verify properties that share or shift modalities. Response times suggest that fast responses can best be explained by the linguistic account, whereas slower responses can best be explained by the embodied account. These results provide further evidence for the theory that conceptual processing is both linguistic and embodied, whereby less precise linguistic processes precede precise simulation processes. (shrink)

Philosophical aesthetics emerges out of eighteenth-century discussions of taste that paid scant attention to the experience of tasting and ingesting food. Sarah Worth diagnoses this historical oversight and offers an unexpected remedy. She argues that we should start our analysis of aesthetic taste over again, this time beginning with the pleasures of the tongue and mouth, and work out from there to consider the kinds of experience, knowledge, and appreciation that belong to eating and savoring. As she argues, (...) our ability to make gustatory discriminations and to determine what tastes good and why is not as different from our aesthetic judgments as philosophers and other aesthetic theorists might have led us to believe. In this engaging and readable book, Worth persuasively argues that food and its many tastes deserve serious philosophical consideration.Worth explores a number of puzzles that arise when we try to make sense of the concept of taste. She disentangles the metaphorical sense of taste understood as a reasoned judgment expressing aesthetic preferences from the literal sense of taste which involves our sensory experiences when food is in our mouths. She discusses good and bad taste, food and pleasure, authentic and inauthentic food, “food porn”—those impossibly glamourized images of food that we find in advertising and magazines and cookbooks and social media—and the role of recipes in the practice of cooking. She places our everyday experiences of food in the context of wider relationships and activities including cultivation, harvesting, processing, shipping, and purchasing, as well as the preparation and cooking meals for family and friends. The book is punctuated by many of the usual philosophical suspects (Plato and Aristotle, Hume and Kant, Bullough and Sibley) as well as critical and feminist theorists, food sociologists, and a number of famous chefs including Fannie Farmer, Julie Child, and Nigella Lawson. If Worth endorses a particular metaphilosophy of food, it would be that of the Slow Food movement, which is the subject of Chapter Three. (shrink)

Gustatory studies are predicated on the existence of basic tastes. Erickson questions this assumption and offers contrary evidence. Although Erickson may conflate certain concepts and demand uncommonly stringent requirements for basic tastes, his thoughtful article reminds us that the basic organization of taste is not yet settled.

The paper addresses issues of predicates of taste, both gustatory and aesthetic in dialogue with Michael Glanzberg. The first part briefly discusses his view of anaphora in the determination of the semantics of such predicates, and attempts a friendly generalization of his strategy. The second part discusses his contextualism about statements of taste, of the form A is Φ, and then proposes a pluralist alternative. The literature normally confronts contextualism and relativism here, but the pluralist proposal introduces (...) further options. First, it distinguishes first-level and second-level, more theoretical, approaches. At the first level it introduces the naïve view option, the naive non-dogmatist experiencer who simply claims that A is Φ and that’s it. On meta-level such an experiencer is simply agnostic about further matters. Then, there is the first-level dogmatist stance, characteristic for people who do sincerely debate the issues, who naively believe they are objectively right. The third option is the tolerant, liberal one: “A is Φ; for me, I mean. How do you find it?” On the meta-level, dogmatic disagreement goes well with value-absolutism, entailing that one of the parties is simply wrong, and with relativism. If one is not dogmatist about taste predicates, one should accept that dogmatist is simply wrong; no faultlessness is present. The liberal stance goes well with contextualism. If one is liberal there is no deep disagreement. So, the idea of faultless disagreement is a myth. But the proposal notes that language is open to all possibilities, there is no single option that is obligatory for all speakers. (shrink)

CALHM1 was recently demonstrated to be a voltage‐gated ATP‐permeable ion channel and to serve as a bona fide conduit for ATP release from sweet‐, umami‐, and bitter‐sensing type II taste cells. Calhm1 is expressed in taste buds exclusively in type II cells and its product has structural and functional similarities with connexins and pannexins, two families of channel protein candidates for ATP release by type II cells. Calhm1 knockout in mice leads to loss of perception of sweet, umami, (...) and bitter compounds and to impaired gustatory nerve responses to these tastants. These new studies validate the concept of ATP as the primary neurotransmitter from type II cells to gustatory neurons. Furthermore, they identify voltage‐gated ATP release through CALHM1 as an essential molecular mechanism of ATP release in taste buds. We discuss these new findings, as well as unresolved issues in peripheral taste signaling that we hope will stimulate future research. (shrink)

When we cook, by meticulously following a recipe, or adding a personal twist to it, we sometimes care not only to (re-)produce a taste that we can enjoy, but also to give our food a certain aftertaste. This is not surprising, given that we ordinarily take aftertaste to be an important part of the gustatory experience as a whole, one which we seek out, and through which we evaluate what we eat and drink—at least in many cases. What (...) is surprising is that aftertastes, from a psychological point of view, seem to be analogous to afterimages, and thus have little or no epistemic import. In this paper we tackle this puzzle, and argue that we are right in treating aftertastes seriously. The moral is that both from a metaphysical and an epistemic point of view aftertastes should be categorized differently from afterimages. (shrink)

The first half of this article argues that, like judgments as to whether something smells or tastes good, judgments about works of art ultimately depend on an element of subjective response. However, it shows that, unlike gustatory or olfactory judgments, we can argue meaningfully about our experience of works of art because they have _parts<D>. Because works of art have parts these can be patterned by the imagination, and this patterning can be influenced by what is said to us. (...) The second half considers five conditions that must be met before someone is entitled to assert, 'This is a good poem,' rather than simply, 'I like this poem now.' Finally, the last section considers why a report of an ultimately subjective response is disguised in everyday usage as an objective judgment. (shrink)

David Hume’s essay “Of the Standard of Taste” —which represents a major step towards clarifying eighteenth-century philosophy’s dawning aesthetics in terms of taste—also relates closely to literal, physical taste. From the analogy between gustatory and critical taste, Hume, apt at judging works of art, puts together a contradictory argument of subjectivism and the normativity of common sense. However, a careful reading of the text unveils a way of appealing to art criticism as a vital component (...) in edifying a philosophically more solid standard of taste. Hume’s emphatic references to a requisite “delicacy” complicate the picture, for it is not clear what this delicacy is, but a close inspection of how Hume frames the criterion of delicacy by means of “practice” and the absence of “prejudice” might perhaps challenge us to address issues of contemporary art. (shrink)

" Qualia " is an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us. As is so often the case with philosophical jargon, it is easier to give examples than to give a definition of the term. Look at a glass of milk at sunset; the way it looks to you--the particular, personal, subjective visual quality of the glass of milk is the quale of your visual experience at the (...) moment. The way the milk tastes to you then is another, gustatory quale, and how it sounds to you as you swallow is an auditory quale; These various "properties of conscious experience" are prime examples of qualia. Nothing, it seems, could you know more intimately than your own qualia ; let the entire universe be some vast illusion, some mere figment of Descartes' evil demon, and yet what the figment is made of will be the qualia of your hallucinatory experiences. Descartes claimed to doubt everything that could be doubted, but he never doubted that his conscious experiences had qualia, the properties by which he knew or apprehended them. (shrink)

Blame is multifarious. It can be passionate or dispassionate. It can be expressed or kept private. We blame both the living and the dead. And we blame ourselves as well as others. What’s more, we blame ourselves, not only for our moral failings, but also for our non-moral failings: for our aesthetic bad taste, gustatory self-indulgence, or poor athletic performance. And we blame ourselves both for things over which we exerted agential control (e.g., our voluntary acts) and for (...) things over which we lacked such control (e.g., our desires, beliefs, and intentions). I argue that, despite this manifest diversity in our blaming practices, it’s possible to provide comprehensive account of blame. Indeed, I propose a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that aims to specify blame’s extension in terms of its constitution as opposed to its function. And I argue that this proposal has a number of advantages beyond accounting for blame in all its disparate forms. For one, it can account for the fact that one’s having had control over whether one was to φ is a necessary condition for one’s being fittingly blamed for having φ-ed. For another, it can account for why, unlike fitting shame, fitting blame is always deserved, which in turn explains why there is something morally problematic about ridding oneself of one’s fitting self-blame (e.g., one’s fitting guilt). (shrink)

Affective experiences such as pains, pleasures, and emotions have affective phenomenology: they feel pleasant. This type of phenomenology has a loopy regulatory profile: it often motivates us to act a certain way, and these actions typically end up regulating our affective experiences back. For example, the pleasure you get by tasting your morning coffee motivates you to drink more of it, and this in turn results in you obtaining another pleasant gustatory experience. In this article, we argue that reflexive (...) imperativism is the only intentionalist account of affective phenomenology—probably, the only account at all—that is able to make sense of its loopy regulatory profile. (shrink)

It is tempting to hold that perceptual experience amounts to a co-conscious collection of visual, auditory, tactual, gustatory, and olfactory episodes. If so, each aspect of perceptual experience on each occasion is associated with a specific modality. This paper, however, concerns a core variety of multimodal perceptual experience. It argues that there is perceptually apparent intermodal feature binding. I present the case for this claim, explain its consequences for theorizing about perceptual experience, and defend it against objections. I maintain (...) that just as one thing may perceptually appear at once to jointly bear several features associated with the same sense modality, one thing also may perceptually appear at once to jointly bear features associated with different sense modalities. For instance, just as something may visually appear at once to be both red and round, or to have a red part and a green part, something may multimodally perceptually appear at once to be both bright and loud, or to have a red part and a rough part. The main lesson, I argue, is that perceiving is not just co-consciously seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, and smelling at the same time. And perceptual phenomenal character is not on each occasion exhausted by that which is distinctive to or associated with a given modality, along with that which accrues thanks to simple co-consciousness. Not all ways of perceiving are modality specific. I defend this account against three main objections: that singular content theorists avoid my conclusions; that apparent infusion of perceptible features is required for perceptually apparent binding but does not occur intermodally; and that the diversity of objects across modalities makes perceptually apparent intermodal binding rare. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Managing the Transition from Patient-Centered Care to ProtocolDavid SlakterI learned that I would need a kidney transplant in the summer of 2015. This was not a complete surprise to me, as I had been subjected to a number of tests and invasive procedures to investigate nephritis since I was a child. I had heard similar stories of clinicians performing repeated tests on my father for similar reasons without any (...) conclusions. Following my recommendation for transplant and consultation with genomics specialists, the cause of my kidney failure was determined to be Alport syndrome. What made Alport syndrome so difficult to diagnose in my case was that the associated mutation is a rare, autosomal-dominant one that has only recently been associated with the condition.After reviewing the data on survival rates for transitioning to dialysis versus a transplant, my family and I then considered the success rates for living versus cadaver donors, and the success rates at various transplant centers. The current data favor the long-term outcomes of transplant over dialysis and living over cadaver donors. Since we had decided to focus on searching for a live donor, my nephrologist recommended contacting Renewal, an organization that specializes in connecting those in need of a kidney transplant with live donors and providing support for donors to make the donation process less burdensome.On Renewal’s recommendation, my family and friends reached out across their social networks to search for potential donors. Many of those tested for compatibility were eliminated on basic matching criteria, others due to previously undiagnosed medical problems. Finally, the wife of a childhood friend came forward as an eligible donor and was also an incredibly close match on the antigens tested for kidney transplants.Having a living donor who was also a friend made the transplant experience somewhat less intimidating than it might have been. It meant the transformation of an existing relationship with someone already close to me, with fewer open questions about what may have motivated them to be so generous than if the donor had been someone I did not know. It also meant our families could be together in the waiting room, and that we shared in each other’s recoveries.Life post-transplant has been a significant improvement from what it was like immediately beforehand. Before my transplant, I regularly weighed food and consulted nutrition charts to gauge how much potassium I was consuming. To prevent too much potassium from building up in my bloodstream, I had to take sodium polystyrene [End Page 111] regularly. As one might guess from the name, it tastes much like burnt Styrofoam, and I could only ingest it with copious amounts of fruit-flavored syrup (strawberry covered up the awful flavor the best). There are other potassium binders on the market now, so fewer people with kidney failure will likely need to engage in such gustatory experimentation.I was also able to engage in more activities than what was possible even years before my transplant. I had long experienced difficulty with aerobic exercises, but assumed the reason was merely being out of shape. Though I have always walked regularly, even the one-mile walk from my office to my apartment had become a chore by the end. Within a few months after my transplant, I was riding a bicycle all over NYC, from Harlem to Brooklyn and back regularly, and hiking trails in nearby state parks. I began sessions with a personal trainer and attained a level of fitness I had not reached since I played soccer as a child.The transition from personalized care to one more driven by protocol has been a surprising and challenging aspect of the transplant process. While my previous experience with medical treatment has been individual meetings with physicians, my post-transplant care is managed by a team of nephrologists and other specialists in transplant care. My initial transplant nephrologist was automatically assigned to me. Because the standard of care for transplant patients is often driven by protocol, my assigned nephrologist recommended a biopsy on my transplanted kidney due to results in my recent lab tests. When pressed on the necessity of a biopsy in my case versus... (shrink)

It is natural to suppose that honey tastes the way it does because it is sweet. Democritus, Plato and Aristotle all agree that this explanation is superficial and lacks causal depth; they attempt to explain gustatory phenomena by invoking explanatorily fundamental features of the world. As they work out their causal stories, do they give up on the common-sense explanation of why honey tastes the way it does? In other words, do they deny that sweetness and other sensible qualities (...) are causally efficacious features of the world around us? ;Our sources for Democritus' thinking on this issue present a problematic picture. On the one hand, Aristotle and Theophrastus suppose that Democritus wants to identify colors and flavors with causally efficacious features of the world around us. On the other hand, Theophrastus and others find Democritus defending the view that colors and flavors do not belong to the world around us. This tension, first pointed out by Theophrastus, is merely apparent, if, as certain texts suggest, Democritus distinguishes the colors and flavors which we experience from the colors and flavors which figure in his scientific explanations. ;In the Timaeus, Plato frequently says things like "What is capable of producing such and such effects on the gustatory region has the name 'bitter' thinspace". On Theophrastus' interpretation, Plato is offering definitions of the sensible qualities: flavors are identical with powers to produce certain physiological effects on the sense-organs. Theophrastus reasonably complains that sensible qualities will lack causal efficacy if they are identified with these powers of external objects, but Theophrastus' interpretation is mistaken: Plato is not defining the sensible qualities; he is fixing the reference of our sensible-quality terms. Recent historical work on the distinction between primary and secondary qualities has often emphasized the extent to which the authors of this distinction were motivated by an interest in supplanting prevalent, Peripatetic assumptions about the nature of sensible qualities, but Aristotle's theory does not differ significantly from that of Descartes: both identify colors with causally efficacious properties whose natures are revealed by scientific investigation. (shrink)

Individuals often describe objects in their world in terms of perceptual dimensions that span a variety of modalities; the visual (e.g., brightness: dark–bright), the auditory (e.g., loudness: quiet–loud), the gustatory (e.g., taste: sour–sweet), the tactile (e.g., hardness: soft vs. hard) and the kinaesthetic (e.g., speed: slow–fast). We ask whether individuals use perceptual dimensions to differentiate emotions from one another. Participants in two studies (one where respondents reported on abstract emotion concepts and a second where they reported on specific (...) emotion episodes) rated the extent to which features anchoring 29 perceptual dimensions (e.g., temperature, texture and taste) are associated with 8 emotions (anger, fear, sadness, guilt, contentment, gratitude, pride and excitement). Results revealed that in both studies perceptual dimensions differentiate positive from negative emotions and high arousal from low arousal emotions. They also differentiate among emotions that are similar in arousal and valence (e.g., high arousal negative emotions such as anger and fear). Specific features that anchor particular perceptual dimensions (e.g., hot vs. cold) are also differentially associated with emotions. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to sketch a framework for perceiving the act of consumption as an aesthetic phenomenon. I shall argue that, under some circumstances, it is possible to receive aesthetic satisfaction from the act of eating food, in which the object of one’s appreciation is, for the most part, considered separately from what is actually eaten. I propose to call such a process “aesthetic eating” and argue that due to its aesthetic autonomy it might be a potential (...) factor in enjoying certain kinds of food. This phenomenon is apparent in the case of the types of food that are acquired tastes. It is plausible that distinguishing the aesthetic pleasures of food from the ones associated with the act of eating can not only enrich our aesthetic life but also deepen the aesthetics of our overall gustatory experience. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The fifth chapter of Saint Bonaventure's Long Life of Saint Francis, the Legenda maior , is a veritable blazon of the body of Francis and its senses, physical and spiritual. The first chapter in the so-called "Inner Life" – the sequence of eight chapters on the virtues of St. Francis – Chapter Five is notable for its insistent focus on sensory experience, due both to Francis's physical mortifications and (...) to his consciousness of the world's beauty, the "comfort" provided to him by the "creatures" he touched, tasted, heard, and saw. The chapter opens with a declaration of Francis's choice to "carry in his own body the armor of the cross" by holding "in check his sensual appetites," practicing self-denial lest he give in "to the earthbound inclinations of the senses," and they impede his spiritual progress. It ends, after an account of four miracles involving tactile, gustatory, auditory, and visual experience, respectively, with a laud of God, the "entire fabric of [whose] universe / came to the service / of the sanctified senses of the holy man." The pivot upon which the narrative turns from deprivation to gratification is, as editors of the Legenda have noted, "a carefully crafted paragraph" on Francis's freely flowing tears, a paragraph "which needs to be understood in light of Bonaventure's theology of the spiritual senses."That theology has been interpreted, however, in vastly different ways by two major twentieth-century theologians, Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar, as the comparative work of Stephen Fields has shown, and as Balthasar himself, writing partly in response to Rahner, emphatically points out. Curiously, neither Rahner nor Balthasar pay particular attention to Chapter Five of the Legenda maior. In this essay I read that chapter closely, partly in light of the questions raised by the disagreement between Rahner and Balthasar . I argue that the operation of the spiritual senses in Francis's soul already at the purgative stage is understood by Bonaventure to have affected Francis's corporeal sensory experience, not as a general habitus but in isolated, expressive acts or perceptions involving particular senses at particular times and places. These corporeal perceptions of God's presence and glory in his creatures are, furthermore, an impressive means and safeguard for Francis's eternal beatitude: "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted" .For this reason Chapter Five singles out four episodes in Francis's life that correspond to the four dotes or endowments of the glorified body. These four episodes explicitly highlight four of the five physical senses, but omit, significantly, any direct reference to the fifth sense, that of olfaction. Represented indirectly in Chapter Five, I propose, through a decisive act of charitable discretion, the spiritual sense of smell becomes explicit in Bonaventure's Legenda maior in Chapter Fifteen, when Francis's body is laid to rest in the odor of sanctity. Linked to his earlier exodus from a worldly to a virtuous life, the descriptions of Francis's "passing" from this mortal life in Chapter Fourteen and of the "transferal" of his body in the immediately following final chapter return to, complete, and perfect the imagistic pattern of sensory experience established in Chapter Five. As a figure for the virtue of discretion and thus for the free exercise of the rational will at the core of the human personality , the obscure and seemingly unimportant olfactory sense proves to be a vital key for unfolding Bonaventure's Christocentric anthropology.Purgation, the Spiritual Senses, and the DotesChapter Five is incontestably associated with the purgative stage of St. (shrink)

This article examines the role of taste perception in Galen’s research on simple drugs in relation to the acquisition of knowledge. To this end, 1.) I make it plausible through an examination of sources that the sometimes increased, more detailed and divergent indications of taste compared to his predecessors, especially Dioscorides and Sextius Niger, are based on Galen’s own research, 2.) reconstruct Galen’s research practice and 3.) examine the presentation of his results in linguistic and logical terms and (...) explain the differences to traditional pharmacology. I argue that a) gustatory perception has a special significance in Galen’s work that goes far beyond its traditional descriptive function and b) that, starting from the realisation that taste and drug action are interrelated, he assigns to taste qualities an indicator function for a much more fundamental principle that causes drug action and thus c) has prepared the ground for a pharmacognosy that also classifies according to taste principles, which was to reach its climax much later. With a view to a practice of gustatory testing of herbal drugs that is still practised today in pharmacy, which, like any other natural science discipline, has otherwise largely lost the sensory reference to its subject matter, the article would therefore like to provide an encouragement to study the “history of pharmaceutical-medical tasting”. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill famously maintained that “animal pleasures” – like enjoying good smells and tastes – are lower quality than the pleasures tied to higher cognition, like the pleasure of enjoying an opera or understanding a mathematical proof. This downgrading is particularly common in the ethical literature about eating animals. Peter Singer, James Rachels, Gary Francione, Alastair Norcross and dozens of other ethicists make quick work of defending vegetarianism by presuming that “gustatory pleasure” is trivial. But is it?

Theoretical Perspective on Smell is the first collection of scholarly articles to be devoted exclusively to philosophical research on olfaction. The essays, published here for the first time, bring together leading theorists working on smell in a format that allows for deep engagement with the emerging field, while also providing those new to the philosophy of smell with a resource to begin their journey. The volume’s 14 chapters are organized into four parts: -/- I. The Importance and Beauty of Smell (...) II. Smell in Time and Space III. What We Perceive through Smell IV. Smell and Other Senses -/- The collection solidifies the area as an important emerging branch of perceptual philosophy by presenting the cutting edge research being done by innovative early career researchers, as well as by those more senior and established within the field. -/- Table of Contents 1. Introduction Andreas Keller and Benjamin Young -/- Part I: The Importance and Beauty of Smell -/- 2. The Role of Smell in Consciousness Barry C. Smith -/- 3. The metacognitive gap: Why we both trust and mistrust our sense of smell Ophelia Deroy -/- 4. Perfumes and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature Chiara Brozzo -/- 5. Aesthetics, Olfaction, & Environment Michael Aaron Lindquist -/- Part II: Smell in Time and Space -/- 6. Smell and the Space Between Us Clare Batty -/- 7. The Temporal Structure of Olfactory Experience Keith A. Wilson -/- Part III: What We Perceive through Smell -/- 8. How Biology Perceives Chemistry: A Causal Analysis of the Stimulus in Olfaction and its Implications for Scientific and Philosophical Theorizing Ann-Sophie Barwich -/- 9. The Accuracy Conditions of Olfactory Perception Andreas Keller -/- 10. Maybe We Don't Smell Molecular Structure Benjamin D. Young -/- 11. Stuff & Nonsense: Against Mizrahi on Olfaction Harry Sherwood -/- 12. The Layering of Smell William G. Lycan -/- Part IV: Smell and the Other Senses -/- 13. From Odors to Flavors: Perceptual organization in the chemical senses Becky Millar -/- 14. Seeing and hearing flavors Błażej Skrzypulec -/- 15. Smelling Gustatory Qualities Louise Richardson. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:In Praise of Blandness: Proceeding from Chinese Thought and AestheticsJoseph GrangeIn Praise of Blandness: Proceeding from Chinese Thought and Aesthetics. By François Jullien. Translated by Paul M. Varsano. New York: Zone Books, 2004. Pp. 1,969.A book praising "blandness"—which is the translator's English word for the French fadeur, which is the author's translation of the Chinese dan!—and a book that is at once fascinating and "repellent" (to use the (...) translator's description of his tortuous search for an equivalent of fadeur and dan), In Praise of Blandness: Proceeding from Chinese Thought and Aesthetics by François Jullien is a "globalizing" philosophical essay bent on stopping readers in their tracks at every twist and turn of the text. Is it worth the trouble? I shall venture a response in this review.More than once while reading this book, I was reminded of Plato's Sophist, where the difficulty in locating the sophist is described in such intricate detail. First he is here, but then he is over there; on the other hand, he could be hiding near by— but wait, maybe he has disappeared. So it is also with blandness. And perhaps it should be so, because once you have located the bland, it ceases to be bland and turns into something else. To take a fix on blandness Jullien throws it against a number of traits, qualities, experiences, and events: strength, music, sounds, signs, landscapes, painting, tastes, literature, ideology, margins and centers, and, finally, the fact that "transcendence is natural." At the same time, the author weaves these contrasts and comparisons through the history of Chinese culture, especially in the evolution of its painting and poetry. [End Page 484]Foremost among the qualities associated with blandness is inner detachment. What come immediately to mind are Daoism, Chan Buddhism, and aspects of Confucian teaching. Jullien has already given us a splendid treatise in his The Propensities of Things, and in some ways this volume rings many changes on that study of Chinese culture. But there is more to blandness than causal efficacy. It also suggests openness and a mood of friendliness toward the other, the different, and all things strange. Further, blandness is similar to harmony in the sense that it does not insist on its own presence. Rather, it constantly blends together opposites through its own power.It is power and its expression that is at the heart of the author's project. He attempts over and over again to show how the seemingly weak is actually the strong, that the far away is really close to hand, that emptiness is charged with spontaneous creative energy. Thus, what lingers is not yet finished expressing itself. And the translator tells us that a gustatory sense is the primary base of fadeur, dan, and blandness. The body is the region within which the bland can have its most powerful effect. Think of Chinese medicine, where "the web that has no weaver" (the title of Ted Kaptchuk's brilliant book) is the object of the physician's art. Or consider the power of water to yield and then conquer all. Or remember the Mahāyāna Buddhist's invocation of śūnyatā as the source of healing and renewal. Or recall the many times that Confucius advises silence rather than words. All these moments are akin to what Jullien calls "blandness."One way to grasp the insight into Chinese culture that Jullien is struggling with is to express it by way of Neoplatonism and Spinoza. What is often forgotten in expositions of these formidable philosophies is the way in which they use a novel doctrine of causality to bind together different realms of beings. For Plotinus and Spinoza the cause never really leaves the effect but remains there, hidden but effective. It is through this lingering presence that transcendence and immanence, body and soul, and God and the World remain conjoined. The image of the ladder so frequently found in these texts must be understood to run in both directions—up and down. So also, blandness is a dao that opens up experience to further depths and heights.Jullien's major concern is aesthetics... (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: I II.

ABSTRACTWide-ranging semantic flexibility is often considered a magic cure for contextualism to account for all kinds of troubling data. In particular, it seems to offer a way to account for our intuitions regarding embedded perspectival sentences. As has been pointed out by Lasersohn [2009. “Relative Truth, Speaker Commitment, and Control of Implicit Arguments.” Synthese 166 : 359â374], however, the semantic flexibility does not present a remedy for all kinds of embeddings. In particular, it seems ineffective when it comes to embeddings (...) under operators with truth evaluative adverbs such as ‘correctly believes that’ and ‘incorrectly believes that’ and under factive verbs. This paper takes a closer look at the problematic embedding data with respect to predicates of personal taste. It argues that there is indeed no semantic solution for contextualism but a pragmatic way out. (shrink)

Aesthetic taste rose to prominence in the eighteenth century, and then quickly disappeared. Since the start of the 2000s, scholars have slowly returned to the main traditional concepts in aesthetics—beauty, the sublime, and aesthetic experience. Aesthetic taste, however, has lagged behind. I focus on two explanations for this downturn: aesthetics is too often associated with art alone and taste is thought to have no connection with anything objective. In this paper, I suggest that theories of aesthetic (...) class='Hi'>taste are still valuable. While tastes will surely differ, individuals should explore the ways that their life and circumstances affect their taste and how they can become more intentional about developing their taste. Using prisons, engineering, and business, I show how theories of aesthetic taste can enter the contemporary scene by suggesting ways that it can influence their respective practices. (shrink)

Acquired taste is an integral part of the cultivation of taste. In this essay, I identify acquired taste as a form of intentional belief acquisition or adaptive preference formation, distinguishing it from ordinary or discovered taste. This account of acquired taste allows for the role of self-deception in the development of taste. I discuss the value of acquired taste in the overall development of taste as well as the ways that an over-reliance (...) on acquired taste can distort overall taste. (shrink)

Contextualists and assessment relativists neglect the expressive dimension of assertoric discourse that seems to give rise to faultless disagreement. Discourse that generates the intuition makes public an attitudinal conflict, and the affective -expressive dimension of the contributing utterances accounts for it. The FD-phenomenon is an effect of a public dispute generated by a sequence of expressing opposite attitudes towards a salient object or state of affairs, where the protagonists are making an attempt to persuade the other side into joining the (...) other’s camp. (shrink)