Lisa Heldke

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, what’s eating us now?” (2-3). Chapters explore shame, disgust, caring, sensuality, colonialism, racism, and global capitalism.

We present a case for defining objectivity as responsibility. We do not attempt to offer new arguments on epistemological issues such as relativism or the fact-value distinction. Instead, we construct a conception of objectivity utilizing analyses from Deweyan pragmatism, feminist theory, and science studies, organizing them around the concept of responsibility. This conception of objectivity can serve as a tool to guide the process of inquiry; by suggesting that participants reflect on the question "how can this inquiry be made more responsible?" it provides a guide for those struggling with the question of how to be more objective.

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 asks whether it is justified to regard persons with mental illnesses in general, and persons with eating disorders in particular, as lacking autonomy, and thus as candidates for paternalistic treatment—force feeding, for instance.

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 cookery itself, but by medicine, the activity against which it is set. In contrast, I shall suggest that attending to foodmaking directly can challenge Plato’s art/knack and soul/body dichotomies in several important ways. My method combines close examination of the passage with more speculative reflections on the significance and consequences of Plato’s ideas about cooking.

The notion that "nature" comes equipped with its own set of categories, enabling us to divide up everything that exists without overlap or leftovers, has considerable explanatory and prescriptive power. I examine two apparently unrelated arenas in which this notion is at work; namely, in the alleged discovery and subsequent physical "improvement" of the headwaters of the Mississippi River, and in the surgical alteration of intersex infants. In both cases, reconstruction is undertaken as a means of eliminating an ambiguity regarded as "unnatural" —an "error" in nature that culture must correct. Elilminating ambiguity, in turn, enables accessibility. Fixing a person or a river firmly in a category allows us to have various kinds of access to them. For a river, the access is in part physical; it means being able to walk up to its headwaters without wearing hip waders. For a person, the access is both intellectual and social; only once I know what sex a person, is do I know how to treat them, and only then do I know whether they are an "appropriate" object of my erotic attention.

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 debates about GMOs. The purpose of such a reframing is to create possibilities for dialogue among participants that will move beyond the polarization that characterizes much of the current debate in the U.S

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 Locke, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Cornel West. Green draws these thinkers together—and draws out the links between them—in order to develop her notion of “deep democracy.”