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4“I Know I Am, but What Are You?” Paul Thompson on the Ethical Irrelevance of DieteticsIn Samantha Noll & Zachary Piso (eds.), Paul B. Thompson's Philosophy of Agriculture: Fields, Farmers, Forks, and Food, Springer Verlag. pp. 173-184. 2023.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 …Read more
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8Book review: Carolyn Korsmeyer. Making sense of taste. Ithaca: Cornell university press, 1999 (review)Hypatia 17 (3): 283-286. 2002.
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33Book review: Carolyn Korsmeyer. Making sense of taste. Ithaca: Cornell university press, 1999 (review)Hypatia 17 (3): 283-286. 2002.
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23Alfonso Morales, Jane Addams, and Liberty Hyde Bailey: Models of Democratic ResearchThe Pluralist 14 (1): 55-62. 2019.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 chemis…Read more
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Introduction to Food Justice and Animal LivesIn Ian Werkheiser & Zachary Piso (eds.), Food Justice in Us and Global Contexts: Bringing Theory and Practice Together, Springer Verlag. 2017.
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Theorizing Alternative Agriculture and Food Movements: The Obstacle of Dichotomous ThinkingIn Kirill Thompson & Paul Thompson (eds.), Agricultural Ethics in East Asian Perspective, Springer Verlag. 2018.
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377Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy (review) (review)Hypatia 17 (3): 283-286. 2002.This is a book about taste--the thing your tongue (and nose) do. It’s also a book about Taste--the thing the art critic has. It’s a book about food, art, and the relations between food and art. Do those two categories overlap? Where and how? How we might best understand and appreciate food in light of the way we understand and appreciate art? It’s a book about how the divergent histories of taste and Taste have left us with an impoverished understanding of the former--and thus a deep skept…Read more
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75It’s Chomping All the Way Down: Toward an Ontology of the Human IndividualThe Monist 101 (3): 247-260. 2018.This paper explores the question: what happens to the ontology of the human individual if we take seriously the degree to which all life on this planet, including human life, is threaded through with relationships in which one creature sinks its ‘teeth’ into another and hangs on for dear life, deriving vital sustenance from that second creature, but sometimes imperiling the life of it as well? Or, to put the matter less colorfully, how ought we reconceptualize the human individual in light of re…Read more
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Coresponsible Inquiry: Objectivity From Dewey to Feminist EpistemologyDissertation, Northwestern University. 1987.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 v…Read more
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208A Du Boisian Proposal for Persistently White CollegesJournal of Speculative Philosophy 18 (3). 2004.What would it look like for a college, white in its history and predominantly white in its present reality, to create a program that responds to, and works in support of, the agenda Du Bois proposes for the “Negro university” of the 1930’s? How can a white college cease to be an obstacle to the liberation of African Americans? That is, how can a persistently white college become actively antiracist and pursue a goal of educating antiracist white students—students who could work in solidarity wit…Read more
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525Farming Made Her StupidHypatia 21 (3). 2006.This essay is an examination of stupid knowing, an attempt to catalog a particular species of knowing, and to understand when, how, and why the label "stupid" gets applied to marginalized groups of knowers. Heldke examines the ways the defining processes work and the conditions that make them possible, by considering one group of people who get defined as stupid: rural people. In part, the author intends her identification and categorization of stupid knowing to support the work of theorists of …Read more
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96The Center Must Not Hold: White Women Philosophers on the Whiteness of PhilosophyLexington Books. 2010.In this collection, white women philosophers engage boldly in critical acts of exploring ways of naming and disrupting whiteness in terms of how it has defined the conceptual field of philosophy. Focuses on the whiteness of the epistemic and value-laden norms within philosophy itself, the text dares to identify the proverbial elephant in the room known as white supremacy and how that supremacy functions as the measure of reason, knowledge, and philosophical intelligibility.
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64Two Concepts of AuthenticitySocial Philosophy Today 30 79-94. 2014.This paper explores two apparently-unrelated forms of authenticity. One, “restaurant authenticity,” is a subcategory of the larger category of authentic objects, focused specifically on food and especially on ethnic cuisines. “Personal authenticity” refers to a set of traits or qualities in oneself. Contrary to appearances, I argue that the two forms of authenticity intertwine in ways that merit thoughtful attentiveness. I suggest that approaching the question of the authenticity of a cuisine wi…Read more
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35John Dewey and Evelyn Fox Keller: A Shared Epistemological TraditionHypatia 2 (3). 1987.In this paper, I undertake an exploration of the similarities I find between the epistemological projects of John Dewey and Evelyn Fox Keller. These similarities, I suggest, warrant considering Dewey and Keller to share membership in an epistemological tradition, a tradition I label the "Coresponsible Option." In my examination, I focus on Dewey's and Keller's ontological assertion that we live in a world that is an inextricable mixture of certainty and chance, and on their resultant conception …Read more
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49A Response to Donald Koch's “Recipes, Cooking and Conflict”Hypatia 5 (1): 165-170. 1990.This paper addresses Koch's concern about whether a coresponsible theorist can engage in inquiry with a theorist who is “beyond the pale.” On what grounds, he ash, can a coresponsible inquirer argue against one who uses a racist, sexist, or classist model for inquiry? 1 argue that, in such situations, the coresponsible inquirer brings to inquiry both a theoretical framework, or “attitude,” and a set of practical concerns which manifest that attitude.
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501White on White/Black on Black (review)Journal of Speculative Philosophy 20 (4): 325-327. 2006.George Yancy writes that he edited White on White/Black on Black in order “to get white and Black philosophers to name and theorize their own raciated identities within the same philosophical text. … My aim was to create a teachable text, that is, to create a text whereby readers will be able to compare and engage critically the similarities and differences found within and between the critical cadre of both white philosophers and Black philosophers” (7-8). White on White/Black on Black collects…Read more
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87Recipes for Theory MakingHypatia 3 (2). 1988.This is a paper about philosophical inquiry and cooking. In it, I suggest that thinking about cooking can illuminate our understanding of other forms of inquiry. Specifically, I think it provides us with one way to circumvent the dilemma of absolutism and relativism. The paper is divided into two sections. In the first, I sketch the background against which my project is situated. In the second, I develop an account of cooking as inquiry, by exploring five aspects of recipe creation and use.
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75Do You Mind if I Speak Freely?Social Theory and Practice 17 (3): 349-368. 1991.In this paper, I develop a way to conceive of free speech that begins by redefining speech. My definition affirms the fact that speaking is an activity that goes on among people in a community. Speaking, I will suggest, is an activity that involves not only the present speaker, but also others who act as listeners and potential speakers. I contend that liberal conceptions of free speech have often proven ill equipped to address certain free speech issues, precisely because they have tended t…Read more
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67Two Concepts of AuthenticitySocial Philosophy Today 30 79-94. 2014.This paper explores two apparently-unrelated forms of authenticity. One, “restaurant authenticity,” is a subcategory of the larger category of authentic objects, focused specifically on food and especially on ethnic cuisines. “Personal authenticity” refers to a set of traits or qualities in oneself. Contrary to appearances, I argue that the two forms of authenticity intertwine in ways that merit thoughtful attentiveness. I suggest that approaching the question of the authenticity of a cuisine wi…Read more
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35On being a responsible traitor: A primerIn Bat-Ami Bar On & Ann Ferguson (eds.), Daring to Be Good: Essays in Feminist Ethico-Politics, Routledge. pp. 41--54. 1998.
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299Book review: Elspeth Probyn. Carnal appetites: Foodsexidentities. London and new York: Routledge, 2000 (review)Hypatia 18 (3): 240-242. 2003.Carnal Appetites does not fully work out a single coherent thesis. Rather, it is a preliminary exploration of a set of issues about food, culture and identity. Here is how Probyn describes her project: “The aim of this book is simple but immodest. Through the optic of food and eating, I want to investigate how as individuals we inhabit the present: how we eat into cultures, eat into identities, indeed eat into ourselves. At the same time I am interested in the question of what’s bothering us…Read more
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60In Praise of UnreliabilityHypatia 12 (3). 1997.Bisexuality challenges familiar assumptions about love, family, and sexual desire that are shared by both heterosexual and homosexual communities. In particular, it challenges the assumption that a person's desire can and should run in only one direction. Furthermore, bisexuality questions the legitimacy, rigidity, and presumed ontological priority of the categories "heterosexual" and "homosexual." Bisexuals are often assumed to be dishonest and unreliable. I suggest that dishonesty and unreliab…Read more
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46Review of Simona Giordano, Understanding Eating Disorders: Conceptual and Ethical Issues in the Treatment of Anorexia and Bulimia Nervosa (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2006 (8). 2006.Understanding Eating Disorders endeavors to answer the question “How should we behave when dealing with a person with eating disorders?” (254). In the pursuit of this question, Giordano undertakes two primary tasks. First, she constructs an analysis of eating disorders that attempts to show why they should be understood “from a moral perspective. Eating disorders signify a person’s belonging and adherence to a determined moral context” (8). Second, she conducts an exploration of autonomy, and as…Read more
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353Do You Really Know How to Cook?Philosophy Now 31 12-15. 2001.In the Gorgias, Plato contrasts pastry cooking unfavorably with medicine, in order to illustrate the difference he believes exists between a mere knack and a genuine art. I attempt to show that Plato’s treatment of cooking distorts or misconceives that activity, and does so in order to shore up his arguments about the distinction between arts and knacks, and about the separation and hierarchy between minds and bodies. Plato’s treatment of cookery seems to be informed not by the activity of coo…Read more
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294Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food (edited book)Indiana University Press. 1992.Philosophy has often been criticized for privileging the abstract; this volume attempts to remedy that situation. Focusing on one of the most concrete of human concerns, food, the editors argue for the existence of a philosophy of food.
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419The Radical Potential of Listening: A Preliminary ExplorationRadical Philosophy Today 5 25-46. 2007.In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill argues that free speech possesses value because listening is valuable: it can advance one’s own thinking and action. However, listening becomes difficult when one finds the views of a speaker to be wrong, repellant, or even simply naïve. Everyday wisdom would have it that such cases present the greatest opportunities for growth. Is there substance to this claim? In particular, is there radical political value to be found in listening to others at the very times on…Read more
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66Pragmatist Philosophical Reflections on GMOsJournal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 28 (5): 817-836. 2015.This essay examines the public debate about the agricultural biotechnologies known as genetically modified organisms, as that debate is being carried out in its most dichotomizing forms in the United States. It attempts to reveal the power of sharply dichotomous thinking, as well as its limits. The essay draws on the work of Michel Serres, who uses the concept of the parasite to reconstruct or reframe fundamental dichotomies in western philosophy; it attempts a similar reframing of the public de…Read more
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328Book review: Judith green. Deep democracy: Community, diversity, transformation. Lanham, md: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999 (review)Hypatia 19 (2): 177-180. 2004.Deep Democracy draws upon the insights of American thinkers whose work has received less attention than the "holy trinity" of Peierce, James and Dewey, in order to investigate current philosophical problems and questions. The work does carry out a sustained interaction with the work of Dewey, in the course of exploring the nature of, obstacles to, and prospects for strengthening the fabric of democracy in the contemporary world. But Green also puts Dewey in conversation with Jane Addams, Alain…Read more
St. Peter, Minnesota, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |
Philosophy of the Americas |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Social and Political Philosophy |