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 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…
by Dwight Furrow Aesthetic properties in art works are peculiar. They appear to be based on objective features of an object. Yet, we typically use the way a work of art makes us feel to identify the aesthetic properties that characterize it. However, dispassionate observer cases show that even when the feelings are absent, the…
by Dwight Furrow Flavors are nomads. They lurk in disparate ingredients and journey from dish to dish. They cross generations and geographical borders putting down roots in far-flung locations, pop up when least expected, and appear in different guises depending on specific mixtures and combinations. Flavors are a molecular flow continuously reshaping each other in…
by Dwight Furrow The term “gastronomy” has no agreed-upon, definitive meaning. Its common meaning, captured in dictionary definitions, is that gastronomy is the art and science of good eating. But the term is often expanded to include food history, nutrition, and the ecological, political, and social ramifications of food production and consumption. For my purposes,…
by Dwight Furrow When we speak about identity, we usually have in mind the various social categories we occupy—gender categories, nationality, or racial categories being the most prominent. But none of these general characteristics really define us as individuals. Each of us falls into various categories but so does everyone else. To say I’m a…
by Dwight Furrow If we are to believe the most prominent of the writers we now lump under the category of “existentialism,” human suffering in the modern world is rooted in nihilism. But I wonder whether this is the best lens through which to view human suffering. According to existentialism, as the role of God…
by Dwight Furrow Does philosophy have anything to tell us about problems we face in everyday life? Many ancient philosophers thought so. To them, philosophy was not merely an academic discipline but a way of life that provided distinctive reasons and motivations for living well. Some contemporary philosophers have been inspired by these ancient sources…