Taste, perhaps the most intimate of the five senses, has traditionally been considered beneath the concern of philosophy, too bound to the body, too personal and idiosyncratic. Yet, in addition to providing physical pleasure, eating and drinking bear symbolic and aesthetic value in human experience, and they continually inspire writers and artists. In Making Sense of Taste, Carolyn Korsmeyer explains how taste came to occupy so low a place in the hierarchy of senses and why it is deserving (...) of greater philosophical respect and attention. Korsmeyer begins with the Greek thinkers who classified taste as an inferior, bodily sense; she then traces the parallels between notions of aesthetic and gustatory taste that were explored in the formation of modern aesthetic theories. She presents scientific views of how taste actually works and identifies multiple components of taste experiences. Turning to taste's objects—food and drink—she looks at the different meanings they convey in art and literature as well as in ordinary human life and proposes an approach to the aesthetic value of taste that recognizes the representational and expressive roles of food. Korsmeyer's consideration of art encompasses works that employ food in contexts sacred and profane, that seek to whet the appetite and to keep it at bay; her selection of literary vignettes ranges from narratives of macabre devouring to stories of communities forged by shared eating. (shrink)

Disgust is a strong aversion, yet paradoxically it can constitute an appreciative aesthetic response to works of art. Artistic disgust can be funny, profound, sorrowful, or gross. This book examines numerous examples of disgust as it is aroused by art and offers a set of explanations for its aesthetic appeal.

Things: In Touch with the Past explores the value of artifacts that have survived from the past and that can be said to "embody" their histories. Such genuine or "real" things afford a particular kind of aesthetic experience-an encounter with the past-despite the fact that genuineness is not a perceptually detectable property.

Although we experience many cultural artifacts by way of reproductions, there remains a particular thrill in experiencing genuine objects—‘real things’. I argue that genuineness is a property that possesses many dimensions of value, including aesthetic value. Typically, aesthetic qualities are perceptual, but genuineness is not a perceptual property. I investigate the aesthetic dimensions of genuineness by considering the role of touch in encounters with old things, using the example of an ancient bronze figurine whose reputation as genuine has waxed and (...) waned, along with its aesthetic assessment. (shrink)

Feminist approaches to art are extremely influential and widely studied across a variety of disciplines, including art theory, cultural and visual studies, and philosophy. Gender and Aesthetics is an introduction to the major theories and thinkers within art and aesthetics from a philosophical perspective, carefully introducing and examining the role that gender plays in forming ideas about art. It is ideal for anyone coming to the topic for the first time. Organized thematically, the book introduces in clear language the most (...) important topics within feminist aesthetics: * Who is an artist and why are there so few women painters? * Art, pleasure and beauty * Music, literature and painting * The role of gender in taste and food * What is art and who is an artist? * Disgust and the sublime Each chapter discusses important topics and thinkers within art and examines the role gender plays in our understanding of them. These topics include creativity, genius and the appreciation of art, and thinkers from Plato, Kant, and Hume to Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. Also included in the book are illustrations from Gauguin and Hogarth to Cindy Sherman and Nancy Spero to clarify and help introduce often difficult concepts. Each chapter concludes with a summary and further reading and there is an extensive annotated bibliography. Carolyn Korsmeyer's style is refreshing and accessible, making the book suitable for students of philosophy, gender studies, visual studies and art theory, as well as anyone interested in the impact of gender on theories of art. (shrink)

Overview essay of the field of feminist aesthetics updated Winter, 2021.

Feminist scholarship has awakened us to the suspicion that such reliance on "common human nature" renders philosophical concepts not neutral and universal, as Hume believed, but heavily inflected by models of ideal masculinity that inform discussions of human nature. One purpose of this essay is to extend this line of thought by elucidating the idea of gendered concepts. By this phrase I refer to concepts that, lacking any obvious reference to males or females, or to masculinity or femininity, nevertheless are (...) formulated in such a way that their neutral quality and universal applicability are questionable. Here I pursue this suspicion by examining Hume's famous standard of taste. Examination of gendered concepts not only casts doubt on the scope and operation of such a standard; it reveals the peculiarly unstable position of the idea of "female" in concepts of the "human.". (shrink)

In 1929 when Aurel Kolnai published his essay “On Disgust” in Husserl's ]ahrbuch he could truly assert that disgust was a "sorely neglected" topic. Now, however, this situation is changing as philosophers, psychologists, and historians of culture are turning their attention not only to emotions in general but more specifically to the large and disturbing set of aversive emotions, including disgust. We here provide an account of Kolnai’s contribution to the study of the phenomenon of disgust, of his general theory (...) of emotions and of the phenomenological methodology he employed in his work. (shrink)

Nicola Perullo's Taste as Experience draws on the author's philosophical background and his experience as a professor of aesthetics at a culinary institute. He aims to understand the experience of taste, analyzing it into three 'modes of access': pleasure, knowledge, and indifference. His perspective, influenced by Dewey, illuminates various elements of taste, eating, and drinking.

Traditionally, the bodily senses of smell, taste, and touch have been designated ‘nonaesthetic’ senses and their objects considered unsuited to be fashioned into works of fine art. Recent innovations in the art world, however, have introduced scents, tastes, and tactile qualities into gallery exhibits, movements that, at least superficially, appear parallel to philosophical revaluations of the senses. This paper investigates the aesthetic scope of the five external senses, addressing some standard arguments about the limits of the ‘lower’ senses. I defend (...) the artistic scope of the bodily senses by appealing to cross-modal perception and to the sensuous aspects of appreciative emotional responses to art. (shrink)

Alexander Nehamas calls beauty a ‘promise of happiness’ and claims that it is an object of love. While this approach appealingly places beauty at the center of both artistic passion and everyday life, it also renders it riskily personal. This discussion raises two main questions to Nehamas. The first question regards the role of happiness in the concept of beauty, for many beautiful artworks seem to acknowledge the inevitability of sorrow rather than its opposite. The second question concerns how beauty (...) may be both personal and grounded in factors sufficiently outside the self to safeguard it against the instability of individual preferences. To explore the latter issue, Nehamas's ideas are compared to those of another Platonist, Iris Murdoch. (shrink)

In his The Meaning of Disgust, Colin McGinn employs elements of the phenomenological theory of disgust advanced by Aurel Kolnai in 1929. Kolnai’s treatment of what he calls “material” disgust and of its primary elicitors—putrefying organic matter, bodily wastes and secretions, sticky contaminants, vermin—anticipates more recent scientific treatments of this emotion as a mode of protective recoil. While Nina Strohminger charges McGinn with neglecting such scientific studies, we here attempt to show how Kolnai goes beyond experimental findings in his careful (...) description of the phenomenological differences between disgust and other emotions of forceful disapproval. (shrink)

This is the first feminist special issue of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Introduction written by Brand [Weiser] and Korsmeyer with essays by Hilde Hein, Paul Mattick, Jr., Timothy Gould, Joanne B. Waugh, Joseph Margolis, Mary Devereaux, Noel Carroll, Flo Leibowitz, Anita Silvers, Elizabeth Ann Dobie, Renee Cox, and Ellen Handler Spitz. A fuller publication from Indiana University Press followed in 1995 edited by Brand [Weiser] and Korsmeyer entitled, Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics.

Philosophers have considered questions raised by the nature of art, of beauty, and critical appreciation since ancient times, and the discipline of aesthetics has a long tradition that stretches from Plato to the present.

Whatever approach one favors, the relationships between the most abstract and disembodied sense of beauty and the physical, erotic sense are clearly harder to sever than many philosophers have previously realized. The soul may be glad to forget its connection with the body, as Santayana put it, but that gladness indicates that the connection is there to be forgotten in the first place. And often it is not so much forgotten as reshaped and transfigured. Such transformations are explored here with (...) excursions into the place of beauty in art; into the queering of beauty in the exemplars of beautiful artworks; into explorations of the marginal and exotic that allure while defying conventional models; into the literal carving of facial features for cosmetic and artistic purposes that both conform to and challenges norms of appearance. In such different contexts these authors dramatize the various ways that beauty can function in relation to personal desires, artistic values, and social authority. Here we can discover beauty not only as a quality and a value, but also as a project and a practice that drives our lives from both within and without--internal standards, external expectations, and ambivalence meeting in provocative disputation. (shrink)

This special issue of The Monist on food adds to the growing number of philosophical treatments of food, drink, the sense of taste, and the activity of eating. Indeed, the last two decades have witnessed a burgeoning theoretical literature on these subjects. This issue not only continues the conversations already begun, but also offers some innovative speculations about how the discussion might continue. Thus the reader will find here perspectives both familiar and novel.

Disgust is an emotion that is visceral, reactive, and uncomfortable. It is also purposively aroused by art in ways that contribute substantially to the meaning of a work. In such cases “aesthetic disgust” is a component of understanding and appreciation. Disgust comes in many varieties, including the humorous, the horrid, and the tragic. The responses it elicits can be strong or subtle, but few are actually pleasant. Therefore aesthetic disgust raises an ancient question: how is it that emotions aroused in (...) practical life become the focus of pleasure or enjoyment when they are aroused by art? This paper reviews a number of accounts of aesthetic satisfaction in disgust, arguing that the most profound uses convey an immediate and visceral grasp of physical vulnerability and mortality. (shrink)

Emphasizing the human body in all of its forms, Beauty Unlimited expands the boundaries of what is meant by beauty both geographically and aesthetically. Peg Zeglin Brand and an international group of contributors interrogate the body and the meaning of physical beauty in this multidisciplinary volume. This striking and provocative book explores the history of bodily beautification; the physicality of socially or culturally determined choices of beautification; the interplay of gender, race, class, age, sexuality, and ethnicity within and on the (...) body; and the aesthetic meaning of the concept of beauty in an increasingly globalized world. (shrink)

The sense of taste falls low on the hierarchy of the senses because it seems a poor conduit for knowledge of the external world; it directs attention inward rather than outward; its pleasures are sensuous and bodily, prone to overindulgence that distracts from higher human endeavours; and its objects are at best merely pleasant, not of the highest aesthetic value. Such is the traditional assessment; now let us analyse its justice.

This chapter contains sections titled: Three Examples Sameness of Experience Touch, Contact, Nearness, Presence Wright's Windows.

Although the arousal of disgust is now widely acknowledged to be an appropriate response to certain works of art, controversy remains regarding whether to consider this emotion an actual zone of appreciative enjoyment. This paper presents several solutions to the so-called paradox of aversion and argues for a brand of aesthetic disgust that produces an experience that can be savored despite its difficult and unpleasant qualities.

“Of all the fine arts, drawing is indisputably the most useful, the most positive, and the most capable of practical application,” declared Sigismond Schuster, author of one of the many popular drawing books of the nineteenth century. “It might in this respect be classed rather among the useful than the ornamental arts, for it is the basis of them all, and is an indispensable auxiliary to every mechanic. Drawing is the language of nature and of the imagination; it secures ease (...) and steadiness to the hand, gives symmetrical correctness to the eye, creates and cultivates taste, leads to the appreciation of nature’s beauties, and offers a never-ceasing source of pleasure which is inaccessible to those who have neglected the cultivation of the art.” Drawing books like Schuster’s were powerful influences over taste and artistic standards in the United States during the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Moreover, to the American readership for which he wrote, Schuster’s appeal to the practical value of drawing and painting was the surest route to preparing a friendly reception for instruction in artistic sensibility. (shrink)