I'm a full researcher at the Centre for Ethics, Politics, and Society of the University of Minho and also a coordinator of Culinary Mind, international centre for the philosophy of food. Before joining the centre I was a post-doc fellow at the University of Milan. I received my Ph.D. in environmental sciences and philosophy of science at the University of Sassari. Along the way, I spent a visiting period at Columbia University (USA). I graduated from the University of Pavia and I was an Erasmus student at Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg (Germany). My research focuses on analytic metaphysics and social ontology of food and environment. I work in Milan and I love travelling and living in big cities, but I spend a lot of time in Sardinia. (I’m an islander, I cannot stay too long away from the sea!) Address: Centre for Ethics, Politics and Society ILCH - Universidade do Minho Campus de Gualtar 4710-057 Braga Portugal
Gianni Rodari, in Il libro dei perché (Einaudi 1984), sbeffeggiava i vecchi
proverbi e si diverti... more Gianni Rodari, in Il libro dei perché (Einaudi 1984), sbeffeggiava i vecchi proverbi e si divertiva a suggerirne di nuovi. Se ne dovessimo proporre uno per la filosofia, potrebbe essere questo: non vi è cosa o tema di questo mondo (o, perché no, anche di altri mondi solamente immaginabili) che non possa accendere una disputa filosofica. Che sia così ce lo insegnano anche i bambini, quando sollevano domande che mettono in difficoltà gli adulti nelle situazioni più quotidiane e rispetto alle loro convinzioni più radicate; e ce lo suggerisce pure la storia della filosofia, che si interseca con quasi tutti i rami del sapere, dalla meteorologia e l’astronomia alla medicina, l’economia e la psicologia. Una delle più recenti (e divertenti) dimostrazioni di questo fatto è poi la nascita di una branca della filosofia che si occupa del cibo. Di cosa si tratta?
In this paper, we establish gastrospaces as a subject of philosophical inquiry and an item for po... more 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.
Geographical indications (GIs) represent the main legal framework for protecting the tie between ... more Geographical indications (GIs) represent the main legal framework for protecting the tie between site-specific food products and their places of production. Climate change recently emerged as a major challenge to the framework, uncovering its inaptitude to account for shifting product identities. Scholarly studies have so far debated the main ecological, cultural, and economic issues that climate change poses to GIs. But, they overlooked systemic conceptual problems affecting their legal framework. This paper uses philosophical tools typical of analytic metaphysics and conceptual amelioration to provide an original conceptual framework for rethinking GIs. We begin with a recognition of the conceptual challenges that climate change poses to the legal framework for GIs. Next, we present our conceptual framework for GIs, articulating its internal dimensions while offering some examples. Finally, we appraise the functions that the framework can play in rethinking GIs: provide a broad and flexible theoretical structure, while also contributing to design new participatory strategies for deliberating about their identities, which involve a usually silenced class of stakeholders. Our work contributes to broadening the scopes and methods of philosophy as well as to complementing disciplines traditionally dealing with climate change, by supplying missing conceptual tools. The framework we lay out can be used as a proxy for rethinking GIs through new decision-making processes that carve out a role also for local actors and communities along with the usual stakeholders.
Our aim in this paper is to employ conceptual negotiation to inform a method of rethinking defect... more 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: (i) the data upon which it rests and the methodology by which those data are gathered; (ii) the ontology that sustains it; (iii) the social acts that serve to negotiate and establish the concept; (iv) 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.
Eating local food has become a mainstream proxy for virtue and a reliable model of sustainable di... more 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.
Liberal democracies across the world have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by implementing meas... more 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 (Rawls 2005; Quong 2011). By combining analytical political philosophy with ontology in an original way, in this paper 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 publicly unjustifiable.
HUMANA.MENTE Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2020
This special issue offers an essay of the current research on theoretical aspects concerned with ... more This special issue offers an essay of the current research on theoretical aspects concerned with the philosophy of food, focusing on recipes. The topic is somewhat new to philosophical quarters. To introduce it, in the coming pages we provide (§1) a cursory map of the current debates in the philosophy of food followed (§2) by a review of the core methodological issues they raise. Then, in §3, we specify why recipes comprise an important chapter for philosophers working on food. Finally, in §4 we introduce the essays of this special issue.
In this paper we discuss the role that individual and collective acts of interpretation play in s... more 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 be given three sub-readings. We then lay out (§3) three case studies that, we submit, any viable theory of a metaphysics of food should be able to account for. We show that one structural reading-based on the idea of negotiation-swiftly accommodates for the three case studies. We thus conclude that this reading is most promising for charting a metaphysics of food.
Contemporary philosophers have studied food and its consumption from several disciplinary perspec... more 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 interrogative, namely What is food?, and then offer three illustrations of more specific research 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 developed.
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 2020
The concept of wild food does not play a significant role in contemporary nutritional science and... more 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.
Boundaries are the outermost parts of objects, with a twofold function: dividing objects from the... more Boundaries are the outermost parts of objects, with a twofold function: dividing objects from their environment and allowing objects to touch one another. 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 follows I outline the different ways in which human beings make fiat boundaries out of nature. Along the way I shall give evidence that a theory of fiat boundaries can be useful to take up as a starting point for doing metaphysics and for giving an account of the ontology of both the material and the social world. The chief goal is to shed light on how some objects depend upon human beings: either in a deliberative or non-deliberative way; either a priori or a posteriori; by means of individual or collective act. Eventually, I will investigate the modal profile of fiat boundaries.
Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del linguaggio, 2020
When I’m hungry, I try to seek some food, namely an object that is edible and that can feed me an... more When I’m hungry, I try to seek some food, namely an object that is edible and that can feed me and preferably it has to be tasty. It seems a very easy task to find it for there is an alleged natural boundary between what counts as food and what does not. I can naturally pinpoint that boundary. Nevertheless, at a closer inspection, such boundary turns out to be suspicious: a roasted human being is both edible and nutritious, and someone may even find it tasty, and yet it can be hardly considered as food. Likewise, a rotten food item is neither edible, nor nutritious and however it can be sometimes considered as food, such as marcescent cheese. Our aim in this paper is to nail down the different conceptions which regulate our conception of what is a food and then come up with a proper definition. We set forth four different stances: a biological one, i.e., food is what holds certain natural properties, an individual one, i.e., food is what can be eaten by at least one person, an authority one, i.e., food is what is considered so by an authority, and a social one. i.e., food is what is institutionally recognized as food.
World food production is facing exorbitant challenges like climate change, use of resources, popu... more 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 polarized understanding of food and diets, famously captured by Warren Belasco in the contraposition between technological fixes and anthropological fixes. According to the first, technology will deliver clean, just, pleasurable, affordable food; future generations will not need to adjust much of their dietary cultures. According to the second, future generations should dramatically change their dietary habits (what they eat and how they eat it) to achieve a sustainable diet. The two fixes found remarkably distinct perspectives over dietary politics and the ethics of food production and consumption. In this paper we argue that such polarized thinking rests on a misrepresentation of the ontological status of food, which in turn affects the underlying ethical and political issues. Food is a socially constructed object that draws in specific ways on habits, norms, traditions, geographical, and climatic conditions. Although this thesis seems somewhat obvious, its consequences on the ethical and political perspectives on the future of food have not been derived properly. After introducing the issue at stake (§1), we point out the polarities that characterize food utopias (§2) and their ontological faults (§3). We hence suggest that a socio-ontological analysis of food can better deliver the principles for a foundation of food utopias (§4).
This paper explores the Persistence Question about cities, that is, what is necessary and suffici... more 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 relocation; and we make the hypothesis that cities do have among their essential properties that of being surrounded by a specific geographical context. Finally we investigate the possibility that a city can survive relocation in virtue of the capacity of its geographical context to survive it in the first place. We suggest that city contexts may not be essentially context-dependent in turn, and outline a possible description of the criteria for their persistence over time.
This chapter surveys the most philosophically pressing issues associated with food and climate ch... more 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.
Gianni Rodari, in Il libro dei perché (Einaudi 1984), sbeffeggiava i vecchi
proverbi e si diverti... more Gianni Rodari, in Il libro dei perché (Einaudi 1984), sbeffeggiava i vecchi proverbi e si divertiva a suggerirne di nuovi. Se ne dovessimo proporre uno per la filosofia, potrebbe essere questo: non vi è cosa o tema di questo mondo (o, perché no, anche di altri mondi solamente immaginabili) che non possa accendere una disputa filosofica. Che sia così ce lo insegnano anche i bambini, quando sollevano domande che mettono in difficoltà gli adulti nelle situazioni più quotidiane e rispetto alle loro convinzioni più radicate; e ce lo suggerisce pure la storia della filosofia, che si interseca con quasi tutti i rami del sapere, dalla meteorologia e l’astronomia alla medicina, l’economia e la psicologia. Una delle più recenti (e divertenti) dimostrazioni di questo fatto è poi la nascita di una branca della filosofia che si occupa del cibo. Di cosa si tratta?
In this paper, we establish gastrospaces as a subject of philosophical inquiry and an item for po... more 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.
Geographical indications (GIs) represent the main legal framework for protecting the tie between ... more Geographical indications (GIs) represent the main legal framework for protecting the tie between site-specific food products and their places of production. Climate change recently emerged as a major challenge to the framework, uncovering its inaptitude to account for shifting product identities. Scholarly studies have so far debated the main ecological, cultural, and economic issues that climate change poses to GIs. But, they overlooked systemic conceptual problems affecting their legal framework. This paper uses philosophical tools typical of analytic metaphysics and conceptual amelioration to provide an original conceptual framework for rethinking GIs. We begin with a recognition of the conceptual challenges that climate change poses to the legal framework for GIs. Next, we present our conceptual framework for GIs, articulating its internal dimensions while offering some examples. Finally, we appraise the functions that the framework can play in rethinking GIs: provide a broad and flexible theoretical structure, while also contributing to design new participatory strategies for deliberating about their identities, which involve a usually silenced class of stakeholders. Our work contributes to broadening the scopes and methods of philosophy as well as to complementing disciplines traditionally dealing with climate change, by supplying missing conceptual tools. The framework we lay out can be used as a proxy for rethinking GIs through new decision-making processes that carve out a role also for local actors and communities along with the usual stakeholders.
Our aim in this paper is to employ conceptual negotiation to inform a method of rethinking defect... more 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: (i) the data upon which it rests and the methodology by which those data are gathered; (ii) the ontology that sustains it; (iii) the social acts that serve to negotiate and establish the concept; (iv) 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.
Eating local food has become a mainstream proxy for virtue and a reliable model of sustainable di... more 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.
Liberal democracies across the world have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by implementing meas... more 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 (Rawls 2005; Quong 2011). By combining analytical political philosophy with ontology in an original way, in this paper 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 publicly unjustifiable.
HUMANA.MENTE Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2020
This special issue offers an essay of the current research on theoretical aspects concerned with ... more This special issue offers an essay of the current research on theoretical aspects concerned with the philosophy of food, focusing on recipes. The topic is somewhat new to philosophical quarters. To introduce it, in the coming pages we provide (§1) a cursory map of the current debates in the philosophy of food followed (§2) by a review of the core methodological issues they raise. Then, in §3, we specify why recipes comprise an important chapter for philosophers working on food. Finally, in §4 we introduce the essays of this special issue.
In this paper we discuss the role that individual and collective acts of interpretation play in s... more 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 be given three sub-readings. We then lay out (§3) three case studies that, we submit, any viable theory of a metaphysics of food should be able to account for. We show that one structural reading-based on the idea of negotiation-swiftly accommodates for the three case studies. We thus conclude that this reading is most promising for charting a metaphysics of food.
Contemporary philosophers have studied food and its consumption from several disciplinary perspec... more 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 interrogative, namely What is food?, and then offer three illustrations of more specific research 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 developed.
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 2020
The concept of wild food does not play a significant role in contemporary nutritional science and... more 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.
Boundaries are the outermost parts of objects, with a twofold function: dividing objects from the... more Boundaries are the outermost parts of objects, with a twofold function: dividing objects from their environment and allowing objects to touch one another. 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 follows I outline the different ways in which human beings make fiat boundaries out of nature. Along the way I shall give evidence that a theory of fiat boundaries can be useful to take up as a starting point for doing metaphysics and for giving an account of the ontology of both the material and the social world. The chief goal is to shed light on how some objects depend upon human beings: either in a deliberative or non-deliberative way; either a priori or a posteriori; by means of individual or collective act. Eventually, I will investigate the modal profile of fiat boundaries.
Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del linguaggio, 2020
When I’m hungry, I try to seek some food, namely an object that is edible and that can feed me an... more When I’m hungry, I try to seek some food, namely an object that is edible and that can feed me and preferably it has to be tasty. It seems a very easy task to find it for there is an alleged natural boundary between what counts as food and what does not. I can naturally pinpoint that boundary. Nevertheless, at a closer inspection, such boundary turns out to be suspicious: a roasted human being is both edible and nutritious, and someone may even find it tasty, and yet it can be hardly considered as food. Likewise, a rotten food item is neither edible, nor nutritious and however it can be sometimes considered as food, such as marcescent cheese. Our aim in this paper is to nail down the different conceptions which regulate our conception of what is a food and then come up with a proper definition. We set forth four different stances: a biological one, i.e., food is what holds certain natural properties, an individual one, i.e., food is what can be eaten by at least one person, an authority one, i.e., food is what is considered so by an authority, and a social one. i.e., food is what is institutionally recognized as food.
World food production is facing exorbitant challenges like climate change, use of resources, popu... more 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 polarized understanding of food and diets, famously captured by Warren Belasco in the contraposition between technological fixes and anthropological fixes. According to the first, technology will deliver clean, just, pleasurable, affordable food; future generations will not need to adjust much of their dietary cultures. According to the second, future generations should dramatically change their dietary habits (what they eat and how they eat it) to achieve a sustainable diet. The two fixes found remarkably distinct perspectives over dietary politics and the ethics of food production and consumption. In this paper we argue that such polarized thinking rests on a misrepresentation of the ontological status of food, which in turn affects the underlying ethical and political issues. Food is a socially constructed object that draws in specific ways on habits, norms, traditions, geographical, and climatic conditions. Although this thesis seems somewhat obvious, its consequences on the ethical and political perspectives on the future of food have not been derived properly. After introducing the issue at stake (§1), we point out the polarities that characterize food utopias (§2) and their ontological faults (§3). We hence suggest that a socio-ontological analysis of food can better deliver the principles for a foundation of food utopias (§4).
This paper explores the Persistence Question about cities, that is, what is necessary and suffici... more 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 relocation; and we make the hypothesis that cities do have among their essential properties that of being surrounded by a specific geographical context. Finally we investigate the possibility that a city can survive relocation in virtue of the capacity of its geographical context to survive it in the first place. We suggest that city contexts may not be essentially context-dependent in turn, and outline a possible description of the criteria for their persistence over time.
This chapter surveys the most philosophically pressing issues associated with food and climate ch... more 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.
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Papers by Nicola Piras
proverbi e si divertiva a suggerirne di nuovi. Se ne dovessimo proporre uno per la filosofia, potrebbe essere questo: non vi è cosa o tema di questo mondo (o, perché no, anche di altri mondi solamente immaginabili)
che non possa accendere una disputa filosofica. Che sia così ce lo insegnano anche i bambini, quando sollevano domande che mettono in difficoltà gli adulti nelle situazioni più quotidiane e rispetto alle loro convinzioni più radicate; e ce lo suggerisce pure la storia della filosofia, che si interseca con quasi tutti i rami del sapere, dalla meteorologia e l’astronomia alla medicina, l’economia e la psicologia. Una delle più recenti (e divertenti) dimostrazioni di questo fatto è poi la nascita di una branca della filosofia che si occupa del cibo. Di cosa si tratta?
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 interrogative, namely What is food?, and then offer three illustrations of more specific research 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 developed.
Papers in Philosophy of Food by Nicola Piras
proverbi e si divertiva a suggerirne di nuovi. Se ne dovessimo proporre uno per la filosofia, potrebbe essere questo: non vi è cosa o tema di questo mondo (o, perché no, anche di altri mondi solamente immaginabili)
che non possa accendere una disputa filosofica. Che sia così ce lo insegnano anche i bambini, quando sollevano domande che mettono in difficoltà gli adulti nelle situazioni più quotidiane e rispetto alle loro convinzioni più radicate; e ce lo suggerisce pure la storia della filosofia, che si interseca con quasi tutti i rami del sapere, dalla meteorologia e l’astronomia alla medicina, l’economia e la psicologia. Una delle più recenti (e divertenti) dimostrazioni di questo fatto è poi la nascita di una branca della filosofia che si occupa del cibo. Di cosa si tratta?
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 interrogative, namely What is food?, and then offer three illustrations of more specific research 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 developed.