Philosophers at Table

Philosophers at Table PDF Author: Raymond D. Boisvert
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780236212
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 199

Get Book Here

Book Description
When you boil it down, one of the most important things we do each day is eat. The question of eating—what, and how—may seem simple at first, but it is dense with complex meanings, reflecting myriad roles that food plays and has played over the centuries. In fact, as Raymond D. Boisvert and Lisa Heldke show in this book, it’s difficult to imagine a more philosophically charged act than eating. Philosophers at Table explores the philosophical scaffolding that supports this crucial aspect of everyday life, showing that we are not just creatures with minds, but also with stomachs. Examining a cornucopia of literary works, myths, histories, and film—not to mention philosophical ideas—the authors make the case for a bona fide philosophy of food. They look at Babette’s Feast as an argument for hospitality as a central ethical virtue. They compare fast food in Accra to the molecular gastronomy of Spain as a way of considering the nature of food as art. And they bite into a slug—which is, unsurprisingly, completely gross—to explore tasting as a learning tool, a way of knowing. A surprising, original take on something we have not philosophically savored enough, Philosophers at Table invites readers to think in fresh ways about the simple and important act of eating.

Philosophers at Table

Philosophers at Table PDF Author: Raymond D. Boisvert
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780236212
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 199

Get Book Here

Book Description
When you boil it down, one of the most important things we do each day is eat. The question of eating—what, and how—may seem simple at first, but it is dense with complex meanings, reflecting myriad roles that food plays and has played over the centuries. In fact, as Raymond D. Boisvert and Lisa Heldke show in this book, it’s difficult to imagine a more philosophically charged act than eating. Philosophers at Table explores the philosophical scaffolding that supports this crucial aspect of everyday life, showing that we are not just creatures with minds, but also with stomachs. Examining a cornucopia of literary works, myths, histories, and film—not to mention philosophical ideas—the authors make the case for a bona fide philosophy of food. They look at Babette’s Feast as an argument for hospitality as a central ethical virtue. They compare fast food in Accra to the molecular gastronomy of Spain as a way of considering the nature of food as art. And they bite into a slug—which is, unsurprisingly, completely gross—to explore tasting as a learning tool, a way of knowing. A surprising, original take on something we have not philosophically savored enough, Philosophers at Table invites readers to think in fresh ways about the simple and important act of eating.

The Philosopher's Table

The Philosopher's Table PDF Author: Marietta McCarty
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101616008
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Talk doesn't cook rice." —Chinese Proverb According to Socrates, knowledge is "food for the soul." That's all well and good for the Socratic but, according to Maslow, food for the stomach is a far more pressing matter. But why can't you have your talk, and cook rice too? With The Philosopher's Table, Marietta McCarty shows you that you can. In this book, you will find all of the necessary ingredients to start a Philosophy Dinner Club, taking a monthly tour around the world with friends to sample hors d'oeuvres of succulent wisdom and fill your plate with food from each philosophers' home country. With recipes, theories, and insights both old and new—all peppered with McCarty's charming and informative prose—you and your friends will: —Enjoy fresh homemade lamb meatballs and tzatziki, and the simple pleasures of life in Epicurus's ancient Greek garden. —Practice nonviolence (in life and at the dinner table) while sharing tofu curry with Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi. —Learn the fundamentals of rational decision-making with a mouthful of bratwurst from Germany's Immanuel Kant —In the spirit of accepting change, ditch the familiar take-out containers and dine on homemade shrimp dumplings with China's Lao Tzu. —And so much more! Complete with McCarty's recommendations for ethnic music from each region to enjoy during your gatherings and discussion questions to prompt debate, The Philosopher's Table contains everything you need to leave your host's home brimming with both nutritional and mental satisfaction.

The First Philosophers

The First Philosophers PDF Author: Robin Waterfield
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019953909X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 401

Get Book Here

Book Description
These first philosophers paved the way for the work of Plato and Aristotle - and hence for the whole of Western thought. This is a unique and invaluable collection of the works of the Presocratics and the Sophists. Waterfield brings together the works of these early thinkers with brilliant new translation and exceptional commentary. This is the ideal anthology for the student of this increasingly appreciated field of classical philosophy.

The Table Comes First

The Table Comes First PDF Author: Adam Gopnik
Publisher: Knopf Canada
ISBN: 0307399036
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 291

Get Book Here

Book Description
Transplanted Canadian, New Yorker writer and author of Paris to the Moon, Gopnik is publishing this major new work of narrative non-fiction alongside his 2011 Massey Lecture. An illuminating, beguiling tour of the morals and manners of our present food manias, in search of eating's deeper truths, asking "Where do we go from here?" Never before have so many North Americans cared so much about food. But much of our attention to it tends towards grim calculation (what protein is best? how much?); social preening ("I can always score the last reservation at xxxxx"); or graphic machismo ("watch me eat this now"). Gopnik shows we are not the first food fetishists but we are losing sight of a timeless truth, "the table comes first": what goes on around the table matters as much to life as what we put on the table: families come together (or break apart) over the table, conversations across the simplest or grandest board can change the world, pain and romance unfold around it--all this is more essential to our lives than the provenance of any zucchini or the road it travelled to reach us. Whatever dilemmas we may face as omnivores, how not what we eat ultimately defines our society. Gathering people and places drawn from a quarter century's reporting in North America and France, The Table Comes First marks the beginning a new conversation about the way we eat now.

The Virtues of the Table

The Virtues of the Table PDF Author: Julian Baggini
Publisher: Granta Books
ISBN: 1847087167
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 271

Get Book Here

Book Description
How we eat, farm and shop for food is not only a matter of taste. Our choices regarding what we eat involve every essential aspect of our human nature: the animal, the sensuous, the social, the cultural, the creative, the emotional and the intellectual. Thinking seriously about food requires us to consider our relationship to nature, to our fellow animals, to each other and to ourselves. So can thinking about food teach us about being virtuous, and can what we eat help us to decide how to live? From the author of The Ego Trick and The Pig that Wants to be Eaten comes a thought-provoking exploration of our values and vices. What can fasting teach us about autonomy? Should we, like Kant, 'dare to know' cheese? Should we take media advice on salt with a pinch of salt? And can food be more virtuous, more inherently good, than art?

Dictionary of Early American Philosophers

Dictionary of Early American Philosophers PDF Author: John R. Shook
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1441171401
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 1252

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Dictionary of Early American Philosophers, which contains over 400 entries by nearly 300 authors, provides an account of philosophical thought in the United States and Canada between 1600 and 1860. The label of "philosopher" has been broadly applied in this Dictionary to intellectuals who have made philosophical contributions regardless of academic career or professional title. Most figures were not academic philosophers, as few such positions existed then, but they did work on philosophical issues and explored philosophical questions involved in such fields as pedagogy, rhetoric, the arts, history, politics, economics, sociology, psychology, medicine, anthropology, religion, metaphysics, and the natural sciences. Each entry begins with biographical and career information, and continues with a discussion of the subject's writings, teaching, and thought. A cross-referencing system refers the reader to other entries. The concluding bibliography lists significant publications by the subject, posthumous editions and collected works, and further reading about the subject.

Metaphysics: A Very Short Introduction

Metaphysics: A Very Short Introduction PDF Author: Stephen Mumford
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199657122
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 129

Get Book Here

Book Description
An introduction to metaphysics offers questions and answers covering such issues as properties, changes, time, personal identity, nothingness, and consciousness.

Philosophers in Conversation

Philosophers in Conversation PDF Author: S Upham Phineas
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136767495
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 201

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume brings together 13 interviews with some of the brightest names in contemporary philosophy, including W.V.O. Quine, Richard Rorty, Stanley Cavell, Hilary Putnam, as well as John Rawls. Covering a wide range of topics from the philosophy of law and logic to metaphysics to literature, the interviews in this text provide an introduction to some of the most influential thinkers of the day.

Plato's Philosophers

Plato's Philosophers PDF Author: Catherine H. Zuckert
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226993388
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 898

Get Book Here

Book Description
Faced with the difficult task of discerning Plato’s true ideas from the contradictory voices he used to express them, scholars have never fully made sense of the many incompatibilities within and between the dialogues. In the magisterial Plato’s Philosophers, Catherine Zuckert explains for the first time how these prose dramas cohere to reveal a comprehensive Platonic understanding of philosophy. To expose this coherence, Zuckert examines the dialogues not in their supposed order of composition but according to the dramatic order in which Plato indicates they took place. This unconventional arrangement lays bare a narrative of the rise, development, and limitations of Socratic philosophy. In the drama’s earliest dialogues, for example, non-Socratic philosophers introduce the political and philosophical problems to which Socrates tries to respond. A second dramatic group shows how Socrates develops his distinctive philosophical style. And, finally, the later dialogues feature interlocutors who reveal his philosophy’s limitations. Despite these limitations, Zuckert concludes, Plato made Socrates the dialogues’ central figure because Socrates raises the fundamental human question: what is the best way to live? Plato’s dramatization of Socratic imperfections suggests, moreover, that he recognized the apparently unbridgeable gap between our understandings of human life and the nonhuman world. At a time when this gap continues to raise questions—about the division between sciences and the humanities and the potentially dehumanizing effects of scientific progress—Zuckert’s brilliant interpretation of the entire Platonic corpus offers genuinely new insights into worlds past and present.

The Philosopher's Gaze

The Philosopher's Gaze PDF Author: David Michael Levin
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520922565
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 504

Get Book Here

Book Description
David Michael Levin's ongoing exploration of the moral character and enlightenment-potential of vision takes a new direction in The Philosopher's Gaze. Levin examines texts by Descartes, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty, and Lévinas, using our culturally dominant mode of perception and the philosophical discourse it has generated as the site for his critical reflections on the moral culture in which we are living. In Levin's view, all these philosophers attempted to understand, one way or another, the distinctive pathologies of the modern age. But every one also attempted to envision—if only through the faintest of traces, traces of mutual recognition, traces of another way of looking and seeing—the prospects for a radically different lifeworld. The world, after all, inevitably reflects back to us the character, the reach and range, of our vision. In these provocative essays, the author draws on the language of hermeneutical phenomenology and at the same time refines phenomenology itself as a method of working with our experience and thinking critically about the culture in which we live. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1999. David Michael Levin's ongoing exploration of the moral character and enlightenment-potential of vision takes a new direction in The Philosopher's Gaze. Levin examines texts by Descartes, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin, Merlea