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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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32Book review: Carolyn Korsmeyer. Making sense of taste. Ithaca: Cornell university press, 1999 (review)Hypatia 17 (3): 283-286. 2002.
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21Alfonso 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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349Making 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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70It’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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206A 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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500Farming 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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77Objectivity as responsibilityMetaphilosophy 26 (4): 360-378. 1995.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 q…Read more
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10The Atkins Diet and Philosophy (edited book)Open Court. 2005.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 i…Read more
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70Exotic Appetites: Ruminations of a Food AdventurerRoutledge. 2003.First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company
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180An Alternative Ontology of FoodRadical Philosophy Review 15 (1): 67-88. 2012.This essay explores some well-traveled territory—the area in which eating and suffering come together. I undertake two projects. First, I scrutinize some foods that are often portrayed as unambiguously either good (homegrown organic vegetables) or bad (foie gras), in an effort to complicate the stories we tell about them. What violence has been heretofore invisible in them? What compassion has been occluded? This project informs a second: an answer to the question “how should we eat?” My answer …Read more
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35Unnatural SelectionEthics and the Environment 3 (1). 1998.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 …Read more
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105Restaurant authenticityThe Philosophers' Magazine 61 94-99. 2013.I think that restaurant authenticity and personal authenticity are deeply intertwined. More specifically, I think that the ways in which we define – and seek – authenticity in things, be they table setting styles, or cooking vessels or ingredients, directly shape, and are shaped by, the ways in which we understand – and cultivate – authenticity in ourselves. To the extent to which we define culinary authenticity as slavish adherence to the methods, ingredients and utensils of the source culture,…Read more
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105Dear Kate BornsteinRadical Philosophy Today 3 101-109. 2006.In this brief paper, I want to begin to explore the possibility that bi-trans dialogue can challenge those forms of oppression that are grounded in sex, gender, and sexuality. I am particularly interested in pursuing the possibility that bi-trans dialogue might result in additional critiques of the sex-gender-sexuality triad. Despite multiple challenges, and myriad historical transmogri-fications (including, it must be noted, the very late addition of gender), that triad maintains its foundati…Read more
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92The 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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63Two 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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479White 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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86Recipes 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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66Two 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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287Book 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
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 |