Lisa Heldke

back in about 1984 or 1985, when I'd been in graduate school for a couple of years at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, I started hanging around with three chemists who shared a house. They were colleagues of my roommate, a chemistry grad student. One of them, no kidding, was named Lloyd A. Bumm, who would always introduce himself by saying, "My name is the best joke I know." Lloyd was a quirky, curious guy who often explored unusual places around the City, unlike the typical chemistry grad student. For instance, he frequently would head into Chicago on Sunday mornings to go to this crazy street market he knew about. He invited me to go with him one weekend; he was looking for a power supply, whatever...

This volume collects sixteen essays by contributors who chew on the diet from a number of philosophical angles and a variety of personal perspectives. Here, you can sample essays written by practitioners of the Atkins diet or one of its low-carb cousins; by people who are not on the diet; and by people who choose to keep mum about their own current relationships to carbohydrates. (We made an editorial decision to respect their right to remain silent on the matter of whether or not sliced bread is the greatest thing since, well, since unsliced bread.) Not only do the writers collected here represent a range of personal eating practices; they also represent a considerable diversity of philosophical perspectives. Here you’ll find essays using the Atkins diet to illustrate ideas from such historically important philosophers as Kant, Hume, Nietzsche, Marx, and Dewey. But you’ll also find essays that examine the diet from the perspective of contemporary environmental philosophy, feminist philosophy, critical race theory, philosophy of science, and pragmatism (to mention just a few of the philosophical approaches employed). Some of the essays use Atkins to illuminate philosophy, others use philosophy to illuminate Atkins, and some do a little of both. All of the essays invite you to think—more carefully, perhaps, than you usually do—about why you eat what you choose to eat. They’re not here to tell you what to think—or what to eat, for that matter. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t going to give you plenty of ideas to digest—at least some of which might leave you feeling bit queasy. Hopefully some of them will also make you laugh—which, as we all know, is a great digestive aid.

This essay addresses Paul Thompson’s claim (made in two pieces separated by 20 years) that “you are not what you eat”; that is, that dietetics is not an ethical matter. I issue a series of challenges to Thompson’s position, all of which have a common underpinning, namely that his critiques of dietetics sound more like the sort I’d expect from an analytic philosopher than from a pragmatist. They are rooted not only in a tightly drawn (if widely philosophically accepted) definition of ethics, but also in a very tightly drawn definition of diet, a definition that doesn’t take much account of context. That the stream from producer to consumer is continuous argues for not forgetting that eating is one link in a chain of activities—a link that literally cannot exist without those that come before it. Resting on this common underpinning are three specific complaints. The first two address what I take to be his implicit definitions of eating and of personhood, challenging his claims that it is possible in principle to separate self-regarding from other-regarding claims, and that purely self-regarding claims are not ethically relevant. The third pushes back on the matter of whether ethics must concern itself all and only with actions that have an impact on others.

What becomes of objectivity if we reject the realist claim that inquiry uncovers the "true" nature of an independent, antecedent world, or the foundationalist claim that inquiry must adhere to a set of independent rational standards? Clearly we must relinquish the notion that objective truths or objectively valid methods are attainable only by inquirers occupying the epistemologically privileged "Archimedean standpoint." ;If we begin by contending that inquiry and its products are in principle value and emotion laden, context dependent, we must either reject the very possibility of objectivity, or we must retool the concept to reflect inquiry's contextual nature. ;I briefly consider and reject the first alternative--the rejection of objectivity--by examining Paul Feyerabend's position, his epistemological epigram "anything goes," and his free society of inquiry. I then explore in detail two sorts of ways we might reshape the concept of objectivity. ;I consider the empirical naturalist position of John Dewey, and the positions of three feminist epistemologists--Sandra Harding, Alison Jaggar and Evelyn Fox Keller. All of these positions share membership in a family of epistemological programs I label "Coresponsible Options." They subscribe to neither traditional absolutism nor Feyerabend's "anything goes" attitude. They are flexible, interactivist and anti-dualist in nature, and they reserve an important place in inquiry for the role of emotion and value. The term "coresponsible" embodies, among other things, the importance of community and responsibility for inquiry. ;I concentrate on the nature of inquiry-as-activity, an activity that takes place in a world where chance and certainty are inextricably mixed. I also focus on the nature of the inquiry relationship. I consider Jaggar's notion of the standpoint of women, but reject it on the grounds that it inherits the problems of the traditional Archimedean standpoint model, including subject/object dualism. In place of a standpoint, I develop Dewey's, Harding's and Keller's models, in which the inquiry relation is conceived as a form of communication between inquirer and inquired, where both are members of the "inquiry community." I ultimately suggest the model of friendship for doing responsible inquiry to produce reliable, useful results