Korsmeyer, Carolyn. Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy
1999, Cornell University Press.
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Added by: Chris Blake-Turner, Contributed by: Christy Mag UidhirPublisher's Note: 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.Comment: This is a stub entry. Please add your comments below to help us expand it
Korsmeyer, Carolyn. Pleasure: Reflections on aesthetics and feminism
1993, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51 (2):199-206.
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Added by: Chris Blake-Turner, Contributed by: Christy Mag UidhirIntroduction: For some time my own interests in aesthetics and in feminism appeared to run parallel yet mutually exclusive courses, but it seems to me now that philosophical aesthetics and feminist views of culture have begun to dovetail and to share certain concerns and orientations. Philo sophical aesthetics is not by and large taking note of this, however, and in the first section of this essay I argue that feminist perspectives pro vide a vantage from which the appearance of breakdown in unified theorizing can be seen to have an underlying order and pattern.2 Thus at first I shall emphasize a potential harmony be tween feminist critiques and recent directions in aesthetics. Then in the second section I shall focus on one of the subjects that has all but dropped from view in the reshuffling of the oretic concerns: aesthetic appreciation or plea sure. I argue that this concept is urgently in need of reexamination, a need that is especially evi dent when we consider feminist alternatives to the traditional idea of aesthetic pleasure.
Kristeva, Julia. Approaching Abjection
1982, In: Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Columbia University Press, pp. 1-31.
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Added by: Rossen VentzislavovSummary: The abject - expressed through the grotesque, the gross and the physically challenging - has long been a source of innovation and scandal in the art world. For Kristeva abjection accounts for much of the complexity of the human condition. She understands abjection to encompass various aspects of our humanity that are often seen as conceptually and/or experientially disparate - emotion, embodiment, affect, repression, criminality, hygiene etc. Kristeva's guiding intuition is that the abject helps arbitrate between our perception of ourselves as subject and object. In the liminal space between the two, the "I" is experienced in its full heterogeneity to the frequent detriment of traditional ethical, aesthetic, and scientific considerations. This has direct bearing on performance art, whose history is marked by the deliberate departure from beauty and, concurrently, the constant renegotiation of identity between the extremes of subject and object.Comment: Best if read together with Sigmund Freud's "The Uncanny"
Kukla, Quill R.. A Nonideal Theory of Sexual Consent
2021, Ethics, 131(2): 270-292
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Added by: Emma Holmes, David MacDonald, Yichi Zhang, and Samuel Dando-MooreAbstract:
Our autonomy can be compromised by limitations in our capacities, or by the power relationships within which we are embedded. If we insist that real consent requires full autonomy, then virtually no sex will turn out to be consensual. I argue that under conditions of compromised autonomy, consent must be socially and interpersonally scaffolded. To understand consent as an ethically crucial but nonideal concept, we need to think about how it is related to other requirements for ethical sex, such as the ability to exit a situation, trust, safety, broader social support, epistemic standing in the community, and more.Comment (from this Blueprint): Kukla uses this paper to describe a view of consent which is relational. This means that rather than asking questions about what each person individually consented to or not, the question is how the people having sex communicated. If they communicate sufficiently well then the sex is consensual, and if they do not it is not. We can use this to challenge a view of consent which has been implicit in most of the readings so far. This paper is used to discuss blameworthiness and responsibility for wrongful sex, and to ask questions about what the real world obligations of agents are, given their lack of complete information
Kukla, Rebecca. Cognitive models and representation
1992, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 43 (2):219-32.
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Added by: Clotilde Torregrossa, Contributed by: Simon FoktAbstract: Several accounts of representation in cognitive systems have recently been proposed. These look for a theory that will establish how a representation comes to have a certain content, and how these representations are used by cognitive systems. Covariation accounts are unsatisfactory, as they make intelligent reasoning and cognition impossible. Cummins' interpretation-based account cannot explain the distinction between cognitive and non-cognitive systems, nor how certain cognitive representations appear to have intrinsic meaning. Cognitive systems can be defined as model-constructers, or systems that use information from interpreted models as arguments in the functions they execute. An account based on this definition solves many of the problems raised by the earlier proposals
Kuokkanen, Rauna. Towards an “Indigenous Paradigm” From A Sami Perspective
2000, The Canadian Journal of Native Studies XX, 2: 411-436
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Added by: Kas BernaysAbstract:
The author discusses the need, significance and objectives of an "Indigenous paradigm" which is a way of both decolonizing Indigenous minds by "re-centring" Indigenous values and cultural practices and placing Indigenous peoples and their issues into dominant, mainstream discourses which until now have relegated Indigenous peoples to marginal positions. The author argues that the main objectives of such a paradigm include the criticism of Westem dualistic metaphysics and Eurocentrism as well as the return to the Indigenous peoples' holistic philosophies in research.Comment (from this Blueprint): A broad consideration of treating Indigenous philosophy, with an introductory focus on Sámi thought.
Kuokkanen, Rauna. The Logic of the Gift: Reclaiming Indigenous People’s Philosophies
2006, in Thorsten Botz-Bornstein and Jürgen Hengelbrock (eds.), Re-ethnicizing the Minds? Cultural Revival in Contemporary Thought. Brill
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Added by: Kas BernaysAbstract:
This chapter considers the notion of philosophy from the perspective of indigenous peoples. It starts by critically examining the concept of philosophy and expands it with the help of feminist and indigenous scholarship which have pointed out the exclusions and biases in Western philosophical conventions. The main argument of the chapter is that the notion of the gift is one of the structuring principles of many indigenous peoples’ philosophies. The chapter suggests that the understanding of the world which foregrounds human relationship with the natural environment, common to many indigenous peoples, is manifested by the gift, whether give-back ceremonies and rituals or individual gifts given to the land as a recognition of its abundance and reinforcement of these relationships.Comment (from this Blueprint): Introduces the significance of gifting as an ecological idea in the Sámi tradition.
Lai, Ten-Herng. Political vandalism as counter-speech: A defense of defacing and destroying tainted monuments
2020, European Journal of Philosophy 28 (3):602-616
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Added by: Simon Fokt, Contributed by: AnonymousAbstract:
Tainted political symbols ought to be confronted, removed, or at least recontextualized. Despite the best efforts to achieve this, however, official actions on tainted symbols often fail to take place. In such cases, I argue that political vandalism—the unauthorized defacement, destruction, or removal of political symbols—may be morally permissible or even obligatory. This is when, and insofar as, political vandalism serves as fitting counter-speech that undermines the authority of tainted symbols in ways that match their publicity, refuses to let them speak in our name, and challenges the derogatory messages expressed through a mechanism I call derogatory pedestalling: the glorification or honoring of certain individuals or ideologies that can only make sense when members of a targeted group are taken to be inferior.Comment: This paper provides two main contributions: first, it talks about not just that but also how tainted commemorations harm; and second, it not only discusses what the state ought to do about tainted commemorations, but attempts to justify existing activism that defaces them. There are many papers on this topic, but this one is among the few that directly engages with the justifiability of vandalism as a form of activism. May also fit courses on activism, racism, and speech act theory.
Lai, Ten-Herng. Civil Disobedience, Costly Signals, and Leveraging Injustice
2021, Ergo 7(40): 1083-1108
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Added by: Simon Fokt, Contributed by: AnonymousAbstract:
Civil disobedience, despite its illegal nature, can sometimes be justified vis-à-vis the duty to obey the law, and, arguably, is thereby not liable to legal punishment. However, adhering to the demands of justice and refraining from punishing justified civil disobedience may lead to a highly problematic theoretical consequence: the debilitation of civil disobedience. This is because, according to the novel analysis I propose, civil disobedience primarily functions as a costly social signal. It is effective by being reliable, reliable by being costly, and costly primarily by being punished. My analysis will highlight a distinctive feature of civil disobedience: civil disobedients leverage the punitive injustice they suffer to amplify their communicative force. This will lead to two paradoxical implications. First, the instability of the moral status of both civil disobedience and its punishment to the extent where the state may be left with no permissible course of action with regard to punishing civil disobedience. Second, by refraining from punishing justified civil disobedience, the state may render uncivil disobedience—illegal political activities that fall short of the standards of civil disobedience—potentially permissible.Comment: Talks about civil disobedience, especially on how its punishment can be problematic.
Lai, Ten-Herng. Objectionable Commemorations, Historical Value, and Repudiatory Honouring
2022, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 102(1): 37-47
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Added by: Ten-Herng LaiAbstract:
Many have argued that certain statues or monuments are objectionable, and thus ought to be removed. Even if their arguments are compelling, a major obstacle is the apparent historical value of those commemorations. Preservation in some form seems to be the best way to respect the value of commemorations as connections to the past or opportunities to learn important historical lessons. Against this, I argue that we have exaggerated the historical value of objectionable commemorations. Sometimes commemorations connect to biased or distorted versions of history, if not mere myths. We can also learn historical lessons through what I call repudiatory honouring: the honouring of certain victims or resistors that can only make sense if the oppressor(s) or target(s) of resistance are deemed unjust, where no part of the original objectionable commemorations is preserved. This type of commemorative practice can even help to overcome some of the obstacles objectionable commemorations pose against properly connecting to the past.Comment (from this Blueprint): Many scholars in this debate have been too charitable to racists, colonialists, oppressors, and their sympathisers. While admirable, I think it is important to expose the flaws of preservationism: there is simply not much value in preservation.
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