Have you heard about The Philosophy of Food project at the University of North Texas?

David Kaplan’s The Philosophy of Food covers a fascinating range of topics (including: Food metaphysics, Food epistemology, and Food ethics). The questions raised by food metaphysics (food as nature? food as culture? food as spirituality? as aesthetic object?) seems especially interesting to me.

The introduction to The Philosophy of Food certainly piqued my interest:

“Philosophers have a long but scattered history of analyzing food. Plato famously details an appropriate diet in Book II of the Republic. The Roman Stoics, Epicurus and Seneca, as well as Enlightenment philosophers such as Locke, Rousseau, Voltaire, Marx, and Nietzsche, all discuss various aspects of food production and consumption. In the twentieth century, philosophers considered such issues as vegetarianism, agricultural ethics, food rights, biotechnology, and gustatory aesthetics. In the twenty-first century, philosophers continue to address these issues and new ones concerning the globalization of food, the role of technology, and the rights and responsibilities of consumers and producers. Typically, these philosophers call their work “food ethics” or “agricultural ethics.” But I think they sell themselves short. Philosophers do more than treat food as a branch of ethical theory. They also examine how it relates to the fundamental areas of philosophical inquiry: metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, political theory, and, of course, ethics. The phrase “philosophy of food” is more accurate. We might eventually come to think of the philosophy of food as a perfectly ordinary “philosophy of” if more philosophers address food issues and more colleges offer courses on the subject—or at least that is my hope.

But why is this subject – a footnote to Plato just like the rest of the philosophy – not yet fully entrenched as a standard philosophical subject?  Why do philosophers only occasionally address questions concerning food?” 

I was going to insert a comment somewhere about food for thought, but, sometimes those kinds of puns just aren’t worth it (and thanks to The Daily Beast for this very interesting find).

Here’s one of the better book reviews I’ve read in awhile.

From the Sunday Book Review, New York Times: “What Friedrich Nietzsche Did to America” –

And really, there’s no such thing as too much Nietzsche:

“With escalating intensity, he issued innovative works of philosophy that challenged every element of European civilization. He celebrated the artistic heroism of Beethoven and Goethe; denigrated the “slave morality” of Christianity, which transfigured weakness into virtue and vital strength into sin; and called on the strong in spirit to bring about a “transvaluation of all values.” The “higher man” — or as Nietzsche sometimes called him, the “overman” or “Übermensch” — did not succumb to envy or long for the afterlife; rather he willed that his life on earth repeat itself over and over exactly as it was. In later works, Nietzsche wrote with continued brilliance and growing megalomania of his disdain for the common “herd,” the dangers of nihilism and the possibility that the will to power is the “Ur-fact of all history.”

American Nietzsche by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen (University of Chicago Press) sounds like an excellent study to me. (interesting note: you can buy a 30-Day ebook license of American Nietzsche for $7.00): “Ratner-Rosenhagen concludes that Cavell, Bloom and the pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty constructed “an American Nietzsche” by drawing upon “philosophical interpretations which understood that in a world without foundations, our views of truth, language and the self are not mirrors of reality but useful fictions to explore new avenues of discovery, new sources of wonder.”

An intellectual history of Nietzsche in the United States covers a lot of ground, after all (the relationship between Nietzsche and Emerson is particularly interesting). I’ll resist quoting page-long passages here. But, here are a few of the good parts:

• “From the start, Nietzsche’s American readers were bewitched and bedeviled … young Americans who felt estranged from their culture, and has continued to do so. But today’s inescapable and perplexing Nietzsche is not necessarily the same Nietzsche who inspired readers in the past”

• “The German émigré and Princeton professor Walter Kaufmann almost single-handedly revived his standing with his many translations and forceful reminder that Nietzsche hated anti-Semites and German nationalists as well as woolly-headed romantics. Kaufmann’s Nietzsche was a late flower of the Enlightenment, a tough-minded rationalist with the courage to face the Darwinian revelation that there is no purpose to nature or to our existence. The true task of the overman was to overcome himself, not others, and to do so by sculpturing his impulses and thoughts and inheritances into a willed unity that could be called “style.”

• “As Ratner-Rosenhagen shows, a later generation of American interpreters, influenced by Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, esteemed Nietzsche not as the guarantor of the individual but as its dismantler. “The ‘doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed,” Nietzsche wrote in “On the Genealogy of Morals,” and the implication was clear: If God was dead, so too were equally fictitious entities like the self. There was no objective truth, only the truth-effects engendered by the workings of power and the instabilities of language. Even as this poststructuralist Nietzsche occupied the university in the 1980s, it bred a counterreaction from conservative intellectuals.”

Fun article from the New York Times: “The Muses of Insert, Delete and Execute.” (thanks ropaterny and jmendelsohn for the sharing the cool article)

I’m looking forward to checking out Matthew Kirschenbaum’s upcoming book, “Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing” — among other things, it’s fun to think about the mix of authors that come up when talking about the literary history of word processing (including the likes of Mark Twain, Henry James, and Bram Stoker).

But maybe the most interesting bit of information from the article was about Stephen King –

“Mr. King’s 1983 short story “The Word Processor,” Mr. Kirschenbaum ventured, is “likely the earliest fictional treatment of word processing by a prominent English-language author.”

The story, published in Playboy (later retitled “Word Processor of the Gods”), certainly captured the unsettling ghostliness of the new technology, which allowed writers to correct themselves without leaving even the faintest trace. In the story a frustrated schoolteacher discovers that by erasing sentences about his enemies he can delete them entirely from the universe and insert himself in their place, a reflection of Mr. King’s fascination with his Wang System 5’s “insert,” ”delete” and “execute” keys, recounted in the introduction to his 1985 story collection, “Skeleton Crew.” “Writers are used to playing God, but suddenly now the metaphor was literal,” Mr. Kirschenbaum said in the lecture.”

Studying the means (mechanical, digital, etc.) by which literature is produced is an incredibly interesting topic. And I especially appreciated this nifty bit of Nietzsche trivia:

“The study of word processing may sound like a peculiarly tech-minded task for an English professor, but literary scholars have become increasingly interested in studying how the tools of writing both shape literature and are reflected in it, whether it’s the quill pen of the Romantic poets or the early round typewriter, known as a writing ball, that Friedrich Nietzsche used to compose some aphoristic fragments. (“Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts,” Nietzsche typed.)”

Nietzsche even wrote a poem about his writing ball –

“The Writing Ball is a thing just like me: of iron
And yet easy to twist, especially on journeys.
Patience and tact one must richly possess
And fine little fingers to use us.”

—————————————————–

By the way — did this article remind anyone else of Foucault’s Pendulum?

Here’s a sneak preview of my December 16th 2011 visit to Authors@Google, on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Philosophy. Lots of fun.

Check out our newest addition to The Blackwell Philosophy and Popular Culture series: Arrested Development and Philosophy.

If you’re like me and something of a rumors junkie when it comes to Arrested Development: The Movie, you’ll also want to catch up on some pertinent bits from The New York Times and NPR, which you can visit here and here.

(And in case you missed it: The New Yorker’s “Ten Things You Didn’t Know About “Arrested Development”)

And here’s a nice review of Arrested Development and Philosophy, courtesy of brainpickings.org. And even better that it comes from one of my favorite Twitterers (@brainpicker)!

I’ll be at Google in Mountain View for Authors@Google on Dec. 16th, to talk about the newly-released book: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Philosophy. Lots of fun topics to cover, including but not limited to: What makes the Dragon Tattoo book series so interesting? Why do we read the kinds of books that we read? Why is reading sex and violence good for us?

Inception and Philosophy is now available!

And, check out Kyle Johnson’s article at Psychology Today: “Inception and Philosophy: It Was All Just a Dream.” What does it mean to think of the entire movie as a dream? Could Inception in fact be both a bad movie, but a really, really good dream? (Or vice versa?)

And whose dream was it? As Kyle points out, there are more than a handful of unaccounted for weird details within the movie (what’s with Cobb’s children at the end? what about the wedding ring?) The fun part about such wonderings, of course, is the kaleidoscopic nature of Inception itself: look at it one way, and see something; look at it another way, and see something else –

“In fact, Christopher Nolan seems to have left multiple clues that suggest Cobb is dreaming—dreaming the entire movie, even when he is supposed to be in the real world. The chase scene in Mombasa, for example, has many dream-like qualities. Not only do the overhead shots establish that Mombasa is a maze—just like one of Ariadne’s designed dreams—but agents (projections?) inexplicably pop up around every corner and the walls of buildings literally close in around Cobb—just like they do in a dream.”

No one clue is likely to ‘solve’ the movie for you, but that doesn’t mean we don’t all have our favorites –

“Still not convinced? (This one is my favorite.) The song the dreamers use to herald the end of a dream is Edith Piaf’s original recording of “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” (No, I Regret Nothing.) When the song is done, the dream is over. That recording is 2 minutes and 28 seconds. Inception is, exactly, 2 hours and 28 minutes. (It’s timed down to the second; watch the count on your DVD player!) Could it be, just like with shared dreaming, when the movie is done, the dream is over?”

Which interpretation of Inception makes the most sense to you?

———————————-

Also, check out this great chart of the different dream levels in Inception. Great for reducing viewer confusion.

With this week’s release of the new Inception and Philosophy book, let’s take a look at some of those beguiling questions that make Inception worth watching over and over again.

Kyle Johnson has an excellent article for Psychology Today (“Inception and Philosophy: Did the Spinning Top Fall?“). It’s tempting to fixate on those closing seconds of the film — did Cobb’s top keep spinning, or didn’t it? — but perhaps that’s a bit of clever misdirection on director Christopher Nolan’s part to keep us guessing on one detail while ignoring some other clues. In fact, Kyle wants you to think about it this way: it doesn’t matter whether the top does fall or not.

There’s a great discussion in the PT article on the role of totems (“an elegant solution for keeping track of reality”  as Ariadne calls them) –

“As the film reveals, you are never supposed to let anyone else touch your totem. Why? Because they might figure out how it works—how it is weighted, or how it is supposed to behave in the real world. And if they do, the totem will not be able to tell you whether or not you are in their dream.” 

Yes, the totems serve as a way for the characters to keep track of what they think is reality within dreams– but how do they really know what they think they know?

What certainly makes Inception a fitting source of philosophical reflection is that there’s ample evidence to support multiple interpretations of the film –

“So, more than likely, the top did fall at the end of the film. Who would dream otherwise? But that tells us nothing about whether or not Cobb is dreaming. He could be in his, Ariadne’s, Mal’s…or anyone’s dream for that matter. Cobb’s totem is not reliable. And, truth be told, neither is Cobb.” 

And, check out a sneak preview of Inception and Philosophy on Google Books!

Some food for thought from The New York Times on Sunday: “The Elusive Big Idea” openly questions societal priorities and with a certain professorial tone concludes that perhaps “ideas just aren’t what they used to be.”

We all know that the basis of the critique itself is nothing new (one example — and not even a very good one — might be the high/low culture debates popularized from Matthew Arnold’s “Culture and Anarchy”). But the fact that this is an old question in a new form should make it more, not less, suitable for discussion in the here and now. Wither the big, grand, epoch-defining ideas?

“The ideas themselves could even be made famous: for instance, for “the end of ideology,” “the medium is the message,” “the feminine mystique,” “the Big Bang theory,” “the end of history.” A big idea could capture the cover of Time — “Is God Dead?” — “ 

I don’t personally buy into the notion of a “post-idea world”, but it gets the point across, and there’s nothing wrong with a little panache in a column about ideas. How did this happen? Many fingers could be pointed in many directions. Example, higher education: “There is the retreat in universities from the real world …  tending potted plants rather than planting forests.” But that itself seems to be more symptom than actual cause. Rather: ”The real cause may be information itself. It may seem counterintuitive that at a time when we know more than we have ever known, we think about it less.”

Now, this does some raise interesting things work additional thought. I’d have to wonder — is our definition of what “information” is changing? I think it is. When questions like the ones in this NYT column are raised, it certainly provides at least some evidence of a growing split between what we mean by information, and knowledge, between being informed and being knowledgeable.

“And that’s just the point. In the past, we collected information not simply to know things. That was only the beginning. We also collected information to convert it into something larger than facts and ultimately more useful — into ideas that made sense of the information. We sought not just to apprehend the world but to truly comprehend it, which is the primary function of ideas. Great ideas explain the world and one another to us”

Are we, collectively, as a culture overly engrossed in the excesses of infoporn, spending too much time on the day to day and too little time on the bigger, existential questions that really matter?

“We prefer knowing to thinking because knowing has more immediate value. It keeps us in the loop, keeps us connected to our friends and our cohort. Ideas are too airy, too impractical, too much work for too little reward. Few talk ideas. Everyone talks information, usually personal information. Where are you going? What are you doing? Whom are you seeing? These are today’s big questions.”

I’m certainly one of those people that believes the debates about might be called ‘information overload’ are from merely academic. It’s a very real thing: “We are inundated with so much information that we wouldn’t have time to process it even if we wanted to, and most of us don’t want to.”

More information means more choices (at least, in theory), which means consumers of information need to make more informed decisions about what information is consumed. It’s not much of a reach to make an analogy between healthy eating habits and healthy information consumption. I think tehre is a hierarchy of information-usefulness. Information — capital “I” — is a notion perhaps in need of collective revising; after all, all information isn’t the same thing as Information.

Social information is sort of thing taking on a life of its own. Like with just about everything else, it can either be a useful tool, or a means of enabling less useful behavior:

“While social networking may enlarge one’s circle and even introduce one to strangers, this is not the same thing as enlarging one’s intellectual universe. Indeed, the gab of social networking tends to shrink one’s universe to oneself and one’s friends, while thoughts organized in words, whether online or on the page, enlarge one’s focus.”

The point is well-made. The picture it paints for a possible future isn’t exactly a good one, nor should it be. It should be something for us to think deeply and seriously about:

“We have become information narcissists, so uninterested in anything outside ourselves and our friendship circles or in any tidbit we cannot share with those friends that if a Marx or a Nietzsche were suddenly to appear, blasting his ideas, no one would pay the slightest attention, certainly not the general media, which have learned to service our narcissism.”

Read the full article here.

More to say about this later … for now here is the sneakest of sneak previews. I think this is my favorite book cover thus far.

I’m excited. Are you excited?

And here’s a link with some additional book details from Wiley.com

* This is Website Post #100! Here’s hoping I can find time and energy for another 1000 more.