Andrea Borghini

In this paper I raise a number of objections to the claim that there are intrinsic properties. I first show that, by functioning as realizers of all other properties, intrinsic properties ground one of the most popular methods for counting individuals. I, then, introduce the five main definitions of intrinsicness (all appealing to a certain form of independency). Hence, I question the claim that there are intrinsic properties on two grounds: first by raising three objections to the thesis that we know of their existence a posteriori; then, by showing that our arguments for concluding of their existence a priori are inconclusive. I conclude that we ought to be skeptical about the existence of intrinsic properties. If we still have aims of counting individuals, we ought to endorse an alternative view.

Liberal democracies across the world have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by implementing measures that significantly curtail the rights and liberties of individual citizens. These measures must receive public justification in order to be politically legitimate. By combining analytical political philosophy with ontology in an original way, in this article we argue that liberal democratic governments have so far failed to adequately justify these measures, since they have not systematically targeted the scholarly study of COVID-19 in everyday environments, consequently implementing rules that are epistemically unsound and not publicly justified, at least not fully.

Our aim in this paper is to employ conceptual negotiation to inform a method of rethinking defective food concepts, that is concepts that fail to suitably represent a certain food-related domain or that offer representations that run counter to the interests of their users. We begin by sorting out four dimensions of a food concept: the data upon which it rests and the methodology by which those data are gathered; the ontology that sustains it; the social acts that serve to negotiate and establish the concept; and the aims and values that it fosters. We then discuss the conditions that make a food concept defective, pointing out four types of defects—fragility, polarization, incoherence, and schizophrenia—which we illustrate by means of two specific examples: local food and healthy food.

Contemporary philosophers have studied food and its consumption from several disciplinary perspectives, including normative ethics, bioethics, environmental ethics, political philosophy, epistemology, and aesthetics. Many questions remain, however, underexplored or unaddressed. It is in the spirit of contributing to fill in these scholarly gaps that we designed the current issue, which represents the first collection of papers dedicated to food from a perspective of analytic metaphysics. Before presenting the five papers published in this issue, we shall briefly frame the current research on food linked to analytic metaphysics and point out future directions of research in this area. We begin with the most basic interroga- tive, namely What is food?, and then offer three illustrations of more specific re- search questions. We hope these examples suffice to demonstrate that food is a fertile terrain of inquiry for analytic metaphysics and that it deserves to be devel- oped.

By looking at human practices around food, the paper brings novel evidence linking the social constructionist and the naturalist theories of gender, race, and the family, evidence that is based on the analysis of developmental trajectories. The argument rests on two main theoretical claims: unlike evolutionary explanations, developmental trajectories can play a decisive role in exhibiting the biological underpinnings of kinds related to gender, race, and family; food constitutes a point of convergence between constructionist and naturalist perspectives because it embeds practices of particular significance for establishing identities of gender, race, and family that, at the same time, are rooted on skills and habits acquired through specific developmental patterns. The paper illustrates and via two case studies involving women hunters and the diet of the Obamas. The latter also suggests that kinds associated to gender, race, and family are entangled.

This volume addresses three major themes regarding recipes: their nature and identity; their relationship to territory, producers, consumers and places of production. The first part looks at taxonomies of recipes, the relationship between recipes and their source, and how recipes have changed over time, including case studies that look at unsourced recipes through to recipes for foods that are very highly processed. The second part identifies the constitutive relationships that characterize recipes, between territory, producers, consumers, places and spaces of production. The third part studies the values and norms guiding the naming, production and consumption of recipes, scrutinising the cultural appropriation of recipes, how to stake authority in claiming a recipe, and the interplay between aesthetics and ethics in recipe making. With contributors ranging across disciplines including philosophy, law and history, and including established academics such as Carolyn Korsmeyer and food writers such as Rachel Laudan this volume will be of vital importance for those looking to understand how archival material forms our understanding of eating habits and culture throughout history.

Eating local food has become a mainstream proxy for virtue and a reliable model of sustainable dieting. It suffers, nonetheless, from genuine criticisms and limitations. In this paper, we suggest theoretical amendments to reorient the local food movement and turn eating local into a robust concept—comprehensive, coherent, and inclusive, affording a firm grip over structural aspects of the food chain. We develop our argument in three parts. The first contends that ‘local’ can be said of lots of entities (e.g. whole or multi-ingredient foods, recipes, menus) and that its meaning varies depending on which entities are under consideration. The second examines three dimensions of being local: the distance from the place of production; the geographical origins; the social links to consumers and producers. The third presents our robust conception of eating local, grounded on a more realistic model that accommodates for heterogeneous and complex actors.

In this paper we suggest that discussions about the identity of recipes should be based on a distinction between four categories of recipes. The central feature that we use to single out a category is the type of relationship that a recipe bears to its author. The first category comprises “open recipes” like wine, pizza, or salad, which come in taxonomic layers and are structurally open for new authors to reshape them. The second category comprises “institutional recipes,” namely those whose authors typically form consortium-like institutions, such as Champagne wines or Quebec maple syrup. The third category comprises “brand recipes” like Coca-Cola, Nutella, or Big Mac, whose names are elusive semantic devices and connote rather than denote recipes. Finally, the fourth category comprises “flagship recipes,” which include all the personal renditions of a recipe whose identity is strongly bound to individual authors; we suggest that their semantics follows a causal-reference model of proper names. Besides its theoretical value, the classification we put forward is offered as a ground for settling legal disputes about recipes, evaluating charges of cultural appropriation that concern recipes, and guiding consumers, producers, and policy makers when they think about foods and diets.

The concept of wild food does not play a significant role in contemporary nutritional science and it is seldom regarded as a salient feature within standard dietary guidelines. The knowledge systems of wild edible taxa are indeed at risk of disappearing. However, recent scholarship in ethnobotany, field biology, and philosophy demonstrated the crucial role of wild foods for food biodiversity and food security. The knowledge of how to use and consume wild foods is not only a means to deliver high-end culinary offerings, but also a way to foster alternative models of consumption. Our aim in this paper is to provide a conceptual framework for wild foods, which can account for diversified wild food ontologies. In the first section of the paper, we survey the main conception of wild foods provided in the literature, what we call the Nature View. We argue that this view falls short of capturing characteristics that are core to a sound account of wilderness in a culinary sense. In the second part of the paper, we provide the foundation for an improved model of wild food, which can countenance multiple dimensions and degrees connoting wilderness in the culinary world. In the third part of the paper we argue that thanks to a more nuanced ontological analysis, the gradient framework can serve ethnobiologists, philosophers, scientists, and policymakers to represent and negotiate theoretical conflicts on the nature of wild food.

Much of the appeal of Armstrong’s combinatorial theory of possibility depends on the theory’s principle of recombination. Despite its centrality, the principle has received little attention in the critical literature on combinatorialism. In this paper, I first set out to discuss how to exactly formulate the principle; then, I show that some notable criticisms of combinatorialism are in fact criticisms to the principle of recombination that allegedly sustains the theory. I focus in particular on Sider’s ‘trickle down’ objection concerning the recombination of mereologically complex wholes and on the objection that combinatorialism cannot account for so-called alien possibilities. The combinatorialist – I contend – can rebut both objections by fine-tuning the principle of recombination.

This essay enriches causal models capturing the propagation of prejudice, bias, and other aggregative social mechanisms, negative or positive. These explananda include the reinforcement of economic inequality, “mob-like” behavior, peer pressure, and the establishment of social norms. The stage is set by introducing various forms of redundant causation and discussing some difficulties with mainstream preemption. Next the main proposal extends current representations of aggregative social mechanisms in two respects. First, it is more nuanced, as it identifies three distinct kinds of inferences: relevance of causes to effects, degree of redundancy of an effect, and the influence that causes exert on other causes. Second, it offers a quantitative—as opposed to merely qualitative—distinction between the causal contribution of preempting and preempted causes.

In this paper we provide a framework for studying the ways in which food endures the passage of time. Central to our inquiry is the following Duration Question: when is it that the predicate-schema “Is an X-Food,” where “X-Food” stands for a certain type of food (e.g., Champagne, yoghurt) ceases to apply to an entity? We show that the answer depends on two independent theoretical aspects: the underlying conception of food and the kinds of change that a specific food can undergo. We then argue that specific answers to the duration question should take the form of conceptual rethinking among different stakeholders (e.g., producers, consumers, institutions), where philosophers would feature among the experts guiding the negotiation.

In this paper, we establish gastrospaces as a subject of philosophical inquiry and an item for policy agendas. We first explain their political value, as key sites where members of liberal democratic societies can develop the capacity for a sense of justice and the capacity to form, revise, and pursue a conception of the good. Integrating political philosophy with analytic ontology, we then unfold a theoretical framework for gastrospaces: first, we show the limits of the concept of “third place;” second, we lay out the foundations for an ontological model of gastrospaces; third, we introduce five features of gastrospaces that connect their ontology with their political value and with the realization of justice goals. We conclude by briefly illustrating three potential levels of intervention concerning the design, use, and modification of gastrospaces: institutions, keepers, and users.

A Critical Introduction to the Metaphysics of Modality examines the eight main contemporary theories of possibility behind a central metaphysical topic. Covering modal skepticism, modal expressivism, modalism, modal realism, ersatzism, modal fictionalism, modal agnosticism, and the new modal actualism, this comprehensive introduction to modality places contemporary debates in an historical context. Beginning with a historical overview, Andrea Borghini discusses Parmenides and Zeno; looks at how central Medieval authors such as Aquinas, and Buridan prepared the ground for the Early Modern radical views of Leibniz, Spinoza, and Hume and discusses advancements in semantics in the later-half of the twentieth century a resulted in the rise of modal metaphysics, the branch characterizing the past few decades of philosophical reflection. Framing the debate according to three main perspectives - logical, epistemic, metaphysical- Borghini provides the basic concepts and terms required to discuss modality. With suggestions of further reading and end-of-chapter study questions, A Critical Introduction to the Metaphysics of Modality is an up-to-date resource for students working in contemporary metaphysics seeking a better understanding of this crucial topic.

Healthy Eating Policy and Political Philosophy: A Public Reason Approach by Barnhill and Bonotti is a terrific effort to provide a systematic method for appraising the ethical aspects, broadly understood, of regulations and policies connected to food, diet, and eating. In this commentary I purport to highlight the originality and the merits of the volume by considering what it doesn’t accomplish in three of its parts. I first call attention to the specific construction of the subject matter, namely on the question whether to be at stake are eating behaviors, dietary patterns, or certain food items; while Barnhill and Bonotti do not problematize it, this question is arguably pivotal to design effective policies and to adequately assess them. Second, I discuss the technical concept of “constitutive evaluative standards,” used by Barnhill and Bonotti to lay out their view, as this part of their work calls for an alignment with research on the philosophy of nutritional science and, more generally, philosophy of science. Finally, I take up the technical concept of “accessible reason,” which plays a central role in ascribing the public status to reasons, advocating for a more thorough determination of this concept based on recent work in epistemology.

This chapter surveys the most philosophically pressing issues associated with food and climate change. It highlights the main scholarly accomplishments and suggests avenues for further research, drawing from a cross-disciplinary body of literature as well as from recent scholarship in philosophy of food. The discussion follows two intertwined yet distinct directions of investigation: how climate change impacts food; and how the production, distribution, and consumption of food affect climate patterns. More specifically, section “Introduction” offers an introduction to the study of food and climate change in a philosophical perspective; section “Climate Change and the Future of Food: Three Frameworks” showcases three intuitive frameworks that form the backdrops of current discourses about the future of food in light of climate change; section “The Impact of Climate Change on Food: a Philosophical Analysis” discusses the influence of climate change on humans through three case studies: geographical indications, global hunger, and food biodiversity finally, section “The Impact of Food on Climate Change: a Philosophical Analysis” deals with the influence of our practices of food production and consumption on climate change by looking at three case studies: food waste, sustainable diets, and food sovereignty.

In this paper I raise a number of objections to the claim that there are intrinsic properties. I first show that, by functioning as realizers of all other properties, intrinsic properties ground one of the most popular methods for counting individuals. Then, I introduce the five main definitions of intrinsicness, all appealing to a certain form of independency. Hence, I question the claim that there are intrinsic properties on two grounds: first by raising three objections to the thesis that we know of their existence a posteriori; then, by showing that our arguments for concluding of their existence a priori are inconclusive. I conclude that we ought to be skeptical about the existence of intrinsic properties. If we still have aims of counting individuals, we ought to endorse an alternative view.

In this volume, Andrea Borghini and Elena Casetta introduce a wide spectrum of key philosophical problems related to life sciences in a neat framework and an accessible style, with a special emphasis on metaphysical issues. The volume is divided into three parts. The first addresses the two main questions stemming from life sciences: what is life, and what is the correct understanding of the theory of evolution? The second part looks at metaphysical questions concerning biological entities: environments, species, organisms, and biological individuals. The third part focuses on theoretical questions of particular ethical and political significance: sex and gender, the biotechnological revolution, and the evolution of behavior and culture. Each chapter is followed by a list of further readings.