Patrik Engisch

This book examines whether wine can be natural and explores what this means and why it matters. Natural wine is one of the most contested notions in contemporary food and drink culture. Its defenders celebrate it as a return to authenticity; its critics dismiss it as a conceptual contradiction. This book argues that both sides have missed the deeper philosophical significance of the debate. Drawing on metaphysics, aesthetics, and ethics, The Philosophy of Natural Wine develops a rigorous account of what it would mean for a human-made object to also be natural. It introduces the concept of naturefactual artifacts—objects intentionally produced so that natural properties become central to their appreciation—and shows that natural wine is a paradigm instance of this broader category. The book examines how such objects ought to be appreciated, what excellences their making requires, and why they represent a genuinely new kind of aesthetic value. Written to be accessible to non-specialists, this book brings much-needed clarity around the topic of natural wine and offers a new and rigorous conceptual toolbox to consumers, producers, and experts to better describe, and ultimately make sense of, their practices. This book will appeal to philosophers working in aesthetics, metaphysics, and the philosophy of food and drink, as well as to researchers in food studies, cultural history, and wine studies. Winemakers, critics, and engaged wine enthusiasts will find in it a precise and illuminating framework for thinking about a practice they care deeply about.

This chapter explores the relationship between memory and aesthetic appreciation by focusing on cases of the latter that are made possible by a specific form of memory, namely, episodic memory. We distinguish between five different kinds of cases in which episodic remembering could be said to be aesthetic in nature: Aesthetic Replay, Aesthetic Access, Aesthetic Progression, and Aesthetic Appreciation. We then focus on Aesthetic Appreciation, arguing that it constitutes a unique kind of aesthetic practice: the aesthetic of practice of appreciating our personal pasts through memory. If correct, our argument shows that memory is an aesthetic faculty on a par with perception: it is a faculty that discloses aesthetic features of the world in a unique way.

This paper argues that we can get a better understanding of how artworks and technical artifacts differ in kind by exploring the role that creativity can play in each domain. In particular, it distinguishes between two substantial kinds of creativity, productive and super-productive creativity, and argues that artworks and technical artifacts relate differently to these notions and fall within different kinds of creative domain, expandable and locked-in creative domains. This, it is argued, provides us with a better understanding of how they differ in kind.

In a series of publications, Derek Matravers has challenged what he calls the “consensus view” of the nature of fiction. According to this consensus view, there is a conceptual route that starts with the notion of a prescription to imagine and that ends up with a systematic distinction between fiction and non-fictional representations. This paper engages in a systematic reconstruction of Matravers’ argument against the consensus view as well as a rebuttal of recent rejoinders offered by Gregory Currie and Kathleen Stock. It concludes that the challenge against the consensus view, once properly understood, still stands.

This chapter explores what it can mean to say that culinary products (i.e., recipes and their outputs) are creative. It answers this question by distinguishing between three different kinds of creativity (idle, productive, and super-productive creativity) and two different kinds of creative domains, locked-in and expandable ones. It argues that culinary products can be creative in the three different ways just mentioned and that, accordingly, the creative domain constituted by the culinary arts turns out to be an expandable one.

Culinary products have culinary value. That is, they have value qua culinary products. However, what is the nature of culinary value and what elements determine it? In the light of the central and universal role that culinary products play in our lives, offering a philosophical analysis of culinary value is a matter of interest. This paper attempts to do just this. It develops three different possible models of culinary value, two rather restricted ones and a third more encompassing one, rejects the first two, and defends the third one.

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.

Do recipes and their instances, i.e. dishes, have any representational power? This is vexed question in the philosophy of food. In this paper, I take a fresh look on the issue by means of a theory of recipes. I argue that once a certain conception of recipes is in place, complemented by a certain conception of traditions, it becomes plausible that certain recipes, traditional ones, and their instances, traditional dishes, can be said to represent past living conditions. Hence, at some some food items experiences could be said to genuinely possess a representational dimension.

In the past years, food has found itself a central focus of creativity in contemporary culture and a pinnacle of this trend has been the kind of culinary creativity displayed at Noma in Copenhagen. But what is culinary creativity? And what is distinctive about the kind of culinary creativity displayed at places like Noma? In this paper, I attempt to answer these two questions. Building up on pioneering work on creativity by Margaret Boden, I argue that creativity is a matter of adding new valuable things to the world. I then distinguish three different ways a recipe can be creative, building up on different culinary trends. I then focus on the specific case of Noma and argue that what is specific about the kind of culinary creativity displayed at Noma is that it emphasizes the role that recipes can play in mediating our relation to the environment.

Kathleen Stock has recently argued that Gregory Currie’s account of fiction is beset by two patchwork puzzles. According to the first, Currie’s account entails that works of fiction end up being implausible heterogenous complexes of utterances that furnish a fictional world and utterances that aim at representing the actual world. According to the second, competent engagement with a fiction can implausibly result in switching from one mental attitude to another – namely, belief and make-belief. In this paper, I argue for two main claims. First, that a few alterations to Currie’s account make it immune to Stock’s puzzles. And, second, that such a modified account presents clear advantages over the alternative one offered by Stock.