-
14Food and Climate Change in a Philosophical PerspectiveIn 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
-
26The Justice and Ontology of GastrospacesEthical 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
-
Spatial fictionalism. A solution of the grounding problemIn Richard Davies (ed.), Natural and Artifactual Objects in Contemporary Metaphysics: Exercises in Analytic Ontology, Bloomsbury Academic. 2019.
-
28Food identity and the passage of timeApplied 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
-
38Eating Local: A philosophical toolboxPhilosophical 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
-
51Defective food conceptsSynthese 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
-
413Ontological Frameworks for Food UtopiasRivista 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
-
45Metaphysics at the tableArgumenta 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
-
46Learning from COVID-19Social 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
-
58On Interpreting Something as FoodFood 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
-
Spatial Fictionalism. A Solution of the Grounding ProblemIn Richard Davies (ed.), Natural and Artifactual Objects in Contemporary Metaphysics. pp. 58-79. 2019.
-
231Can a City Be Relocated? Exploring the Metaphysics of Context- DependencyArgumenta. forthcoming.This paper explores the Persistence Question about cities, that is, what is necessary and sufficient for two cities existing at different times to be numerically identical. We first show that we can possibly put an end to the existence of a city in a number of ways other than by physically destroying it, which reveals the metaphysics of cities to be partly different from that of ordinary objects. Then we focus in particular on the commonly perceived vulnerability of cities to imaginary relocatio…Read more
-
23Fiat boundaries: how to fictionally carve nature at its jointsPhilosophical Inquiries 8 (2): 85-106. 2020.Boundaries are the outermost parts of objects, with a twofold function: dividing objects from their environment and allowing objects to touch each other. The task of this paper is to classify and describe the human dependent boundaries, i.e., the so-called fiat boundaries, on the basis of the seminal work by Smith and Varzi. Roughly, a fiat boundary is a marker of discontinuity between two or more objects which relies on a human function assignment, usually called ‘fiat act’. In what follow …Read more
-
38A gradient framework for wild foodsStudies 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
Braga, Portugal
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Food and Drink |
Metaphysics |
Environmental Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Food and Drink |
Metaphysics |
Environmental Philosophy |