Dwight Furrow is Professor of Philosophy at San Diego Mesa College in San Diego, California. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from University of California, Riverside in 1993 and specializes in the philosophy of food and wine, aesthetics, and ethics. Professor Furrow is the publisher and author of Edible Arts, a blog devoted to food and wine aesthetics. He is also the author of Ethics: Key Concepts in Philosophy, Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America, Against Theory: Continental and Analytic Challenges in Moral Philosophy and many professional journal articles, op-ed pieces, and magazine articles on issues in ethics and political philosophy. He can be reached through the Edible Arts blog. Email: dwightfurrow [at] gmail [dot] com
by Dwight Furrow It’s not intimate, it’s philosophy. That sounds like something ChatGPT would say but there is truth in it. Philosophical writing is seldom intimate. When philosophical writing styles are discussed, Nietzsche is usually trotted out as the example that avoids the calculated, dispassionate, heavily qualified tone of philosophy. But intimate? No. Nietzsche was…
by Dwight Furrow In World of Fine Wine, Master of Wine Benjamin Lewin speculates about whether AI could replace human-generated wine criticism. He acknowledges the obvious limitation: “A chatbot cannot smell or taste.” Yet he thinks this may not matter. Wine, after all, consists of measurable properties. The intensity of color and its wavelength can…
by Dwight Furrow A moat is what protects a business from competition. The term comes from Warren Buffett’s image of a castle surrounded by water. The castle is the business; the moat is whatever prevents rivals from storming the walls. A moat might be a famous brand, a patent, a network effect, control over scarce…
by Dwight Furrow The debate about whether artificial intelligence might one day become conscious is philosophically interesting. It raises age-old philosophical questions in a new form: What is a mind? What counts as experience? What would it mean for something made of code and silicon to have beliefs, desires, or a point of view? I…
by Dwight Furrow The question of whether AI is capable of having conscious experiences is not an abstract philosophical debate. It has real consequences and getting the wrong answer is dangerous. If AI is conscious then we will experience substantial pressure to confer human and individual rights on AI entities, especially if they report experiencing…
by Dwight Furrow Let’s grant, for the sake of argument, the relatively short-range ambition that organizes much of rhetoric about artificial intelligence. That ambition is called artificial general intelligence (AGI), understood as the point at which machines can perform most economically productive cognitive tasks better than most humans. The exact timeline when we will reach…
by Dwight Furrow We have slid almost imperceptibly and, to be honest, gratefully, into a world that offers to think, plan, and decide on our behalf. Calendars propose our meetings; feeds anticipate our moods; large language models can summarize our desires before we’ve fully articulated them. Agency is the human capacity to initiate, to be…
by Dwight Furrow Wine tasting is a great seducer for those with an analytic cast of mind. No other beverage has attracted such elaborate taxonomies: geographical classifications, wine variety classifications, quality classifications, aroma wheels, mouthfeel wheels, and numerical scores. To taste wine, in this dominant model, is to decode—to fix a varietal essence, to pin…
by Dwight Furrow In a culture oscillating between dietary asceticism and culinary spectacle—fasts followed by feasts, detox regimens bracketed by indulgent food porn—it is easy to miss the sensuous meaningfulness of ordinary, everyday eating. We are entranced by extremes in part because they distract us from the steady, ordinary pleasures that thread through our daily…
by Dwight Furrow It is a curious legacy of philosophy that the tongue, the organ of speech, has been treated as the dumbest of the senses. Taste, in the classical Western canon, has for centuries carried the stigma of being base, ephemeral, and merely pleasurable. In other words, unserious. Beauty, it was argued, resides in…
by Dwight Furrow If there is one commonly held “truth” that governs conventional wisdom about wine tasting, it is that wine tasting is thoroughly subjective. We all have different preferences, unique wine tasting histories, and different sensory thresholds for detecting aromatic compounds. One person’s scintillating Burgundian Pinot Noir is another person’s thin, weedy plonk. But…
by Dwight Furrow Does food express emotion? At first glance, most people might quickly answer yes. Good food fills us with joy, bad food is disgusting, and Grandma’s apple pie warms and comforts us. However, these reactions confuse causation with expression. We can see the confusion more clearly if we look at how music can…
by Dwight Furrow Much philosophical writing about food has included discussions of whether and why food can be a serious aesthetic object, in some cases aspiring to the level of art. These questions often turn on whether we create mental representations of flavors and textures that are as orderly and precise as the representations we…
by Dwight Furrow In philosophical debates about the aesthetic potential of cuisine, one central topic has been the degree to which smell and taste give us rich and structured information about the nature of reality. Aesthetic appreciation involves reflection on the meaning and significance of an aesthetic object such as a painting or musical work.…
by Dwight Furrow In an age where there is little agreement about anything, there is one assertion almost everyone agrees with—there is no disputing taste. If someone likes simple food instead of complex concoctions, who is to say that’s wrong. If I prefer bodice rippers to 19th Century Russian novels, you might say my tastes…
by Dwight Furrow One longstanding debate in aesthetics concerns the relative virtues of formalism vs. contextualism. This debate, which preoccupied art theorists in the 20th Century, now rages in the culinary world of the 21st Century. Roughly, the controversy is about whether a work of art is best appreciated by attending to its sensory properties…
by Dwight Furrow Is there such a thing as tasting expertise that, if mastered, would help us enjoy a dish or a meal? It isn’t obvious such expertise has been identified. The most prominent model of tasting expertise is derived from the practice of wine tasting and has been extended to the assessment of cheese,…
by Dwight Furrow In a previous post, I began to articulate a conception of gastronomic pleasure loosely based on Aristotle’s view that pleasure is the natural culmination of unimpeded activity. I make use of such an ancient theory because it strikes me as true that when we exercise fundamental human capacities, and that activity proceeds…
by Dwight Furrow It might strike you as odd, if not thoroughly antiquarian, to reach back to Aristotle to understand gastronomic pleasure. Haven’t we made progress on the nature of pleasure over the past 2500 years? Well, yes and no. The philosophical debate about the nature of pleasure, with its characteristic ambiguities and uncertainties, persists…
by Dwight Furrow In debates about hedonism and the role of pleasure in life, we too often associate pleasure with passive consumption and then complain that a life devoted to passive consumption is unproductive and unserious. But this ignores the fact that the most enduring and life-sustaining pleasures are those in which we find joy…