•  34
    Metaphysics at the table
    Argumenta 2 (10): 179-184. 2020.
    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…Read more
  •  5
    Food and Climate Change in a Philosophical Perspective
    with Nicola Piras and Beatrice Serini
    In Pellegrino Gianfranco & Marcello Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Climate Change, Springer Nature. pp. 845-870. 2023.
    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 pat…Read more
  •  10
    Stakeholders and Experts in Culinary Cultural Heritage
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. forthcoming.
    This article is about culinary authenticity as a cultural heritage issue. Our purpose is to establish a distinction between experts and stakeholders that, as we.
  •  12
    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, nam…Read more
  •  14
    The Justice and Ontology of Gastrospaces
    with Matteo Bonotti, Nicola Piras, and Beatrice Serini
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 26 (1): 91-111. 2023.
    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;…Read more
  •  1
  •  8
    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 …Read more
  • 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: envi…Read more
  •  13
    Mob Rules: Toward a Causal Model of Social Structure
    American Philosophical Quarterly 59 (1): 11-26. 2022.
    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 mechanis…Read more
  •  18
    Food identity and the passage of time
    Applied ontology 17 (4): 443-463. 2022.
    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 th…Read more
  •  29
    Eating Local: A philosophical toolbox
    with Nicola Piras and Beatrice Serini
    Philosophical Quarterly 72 (3): 527-551. 2022.
    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 e…Read more
  •  31
    Defective food concepts
    with Nicola Piras and Beatrice Serini
    Synthese 199 (5-6): 12225-12249. 2021.
    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 establis…Read more
  •  252
    In this paper, we aim at rethinking the concept of obesity in a way that better captures the connection between underlying medical aspects, on the one hand, and an individual’s developmental history, on the other. Our proposal rests on the idea that obesity is not to be understood as a phenotypic trait or character; rather, obesity represents one of the many possible states of a more complex phenotypic trait that we call ‘energy metabolism.’ We argue that this apparently simple conceptual shift …Read more
  •  338
    Ontological Frameworks for Food Utopias
    with Nicola Piras and Beatrice Serini
    Rivista di Estetica 1 (75): 120-142. 2020.
    World food production is facing exorbitant challenges like climate change, use of resources, population growth, and dietary changes. These, in turn, raise major ethical and political questions, such as how to uphold the right to adequate nutrition, or the right to enact a gastronomic culture and to preserve the conditions to do so. Proposals for utopic solutions vary from vertical farming and lab meat to diets filled with the most fanciful insects and seaweeds. Common to all proposals is a pola…Read more
  •  30
    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 reci…Read more
  •  32
    Learning from COVID-19
    with Matteo Bonotti, Nicola Piras, and Beatrice Serini
    Social Theory and Practice 48 (3): 429-456. 2022.
    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 ta…Read more
  •  27
    Recipes, Their Authors, and Their Names
    with Matteo Gandolini
    Humana Mente 13 (38). 2020.
    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 aut…Read more
  •  24
    A gradient framework for wild foods
    with Nicola Piras and Beatrice Serini
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 84 101293. 2020.
    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…Read more
  •  41
    On Interpreting Something as Food
    Food Ethics 6 (1): 1-10. 2021.
    In this paper we discuss the role that individual and collective acts of interpretation play in shaping a metaphysics of food. Our analysis moves from David Kaplan’s recent contention that food is always open to interpretation, and substantially expands its theoretical underpinnings by drawing on recent scholarship on food and social ontology. After setting up the terms of the discussion (§1), we suggest (§2) that the contention can be read subjectively or structurally, and that the latter can b…Read more
  •  6
    Dispositions and Their Intentions
    In Gregor Damschen, Robert Schnepf & Karsten Stueber (eds.), Debating Dispositions. Issues in Metaphysics, Epistemology and Philosophy of Mind, De Gruyter. pp. 204-220. 2009.
  •  164
    What Is a Recipe?
    Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 28 (4): 719-738. 2015.
    The ontology of recipes is by and large unexplored. In this paper, I offer a three-steps account. After introducing some key terminology, I distinguish four main options for a theory of recipes: realism, constructivism, existentialism, and the naïve approach. Hence, I first argue that recipes are social entities whose identity depends on a process of identification, typically performed by means of a performative utterance on the part of a cook ; thus, the best theoretical framework for a theory …Read more
  •  152
    While philosophers tend to consider a single type of causal history, biologists distinguish between two kinds of causal history: evolutionary history and developmental history. This essay studies the peculiarity of development as a criterion for the individuation of biological traits and its relation to form, function, and evolution. By focusing on examples involving serial homologies and genetic reprogramming, we argue that morphology (form) and function, even when supplemented with evolutionar…Read more
  •  6491
    Introduction: Lessons from the Scientific Butchery
    In Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O'Rourke & Matthew H. Slater (eds.), Carving Nature at its Joints: Natural Kinds in Metaphysics and Science, Mit Press. 2013.
    Good chefs know the importance of maintaining sharp knives in the kitchen. What’s their secret? A well-worn Taoist allegory offers some advice. The king asks about his butcher’s impressive knifework. “Ordinary butchers,” he replied “hack their way through the animal. Thus their knife always needs sharpening. My father taught me the Taoist way. I merely lay the knife by the natural openings and let it find its own way through. Thus it never needs sharpening” (Kahn 1995, vii; see also Watson 2003,…Read more
  •  363
    There seems to be a minimal core that every theory wishing to accommodate the intuition that the future is open must contain: a denial of physical determinism (i.e. the thesis that what future states the universe will be in is implied by what states it has been in), and a denial of strong fatalism (i.e. the thesis that, at every time, what will subsequently be the case is metaphysically necessary).1 Those two requirements are often associated with the idea of an objective temporal flow and the n…Read more
  •  380
    I confini di un taglio
    In Elena Casetta & Valeria Giardino (eds.), Mettere a fuoco il mondo, Isonomia - Epistemologica Series Editor, University of Urbino. pp. 14-22. 2014.
    Che gli esseri umani esperiscano e rappresentino il mondo come un dominio ricco di confini è piuttosto ovvio. Tuttavia, Achille Varzi ha sottolineato a più riprese nelle sue opere che, dal punto di vista metafisico, è interessante chiedersi se i confini siano tutti dello stesso tipo. Tale domanda ci permette, infatti, di affrontare con un registro intuitivo una serie di questioni classiche circa la natura del mondo. In queste poche pagine vorrei considerare il tema dei confini da un’angolatura s…Read more
  •  26
    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 …Read more
  •  17
    Time and Realism, by Yuval Dolev (review)
    Humana Mente 3 (8): 173-176. 2009.