Making Sense of Taste

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. 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 tas

Carolyn Korsmeyer is Professor of Philosophy at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. She is the author or editor of several books in aesthetics and philosophy of art, feminist philosophy, and emotion theory

List of Illustrations

ix

(2)

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction

1

(10)

CHAPTER ONE The Hierarchy of the Senses

11

(27)

CHAPTER TWO Philosophies of Taste: Aesthetic and Nonaesthetic Senses

38

(30)

CHAPTER THREE The Science of Taste

68

(35)

CHAPTER FOUR The Meaning of Taste and the Taste of Meaning

103

(43)

CHAPTER FIVE The Visual Appetite: Representing Taste and Food

146

(39)

CHAPTER SIX Narratives of Eating

185

(40)

Index

225

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Making Sense of Taste

Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials