Making Sense of Taste

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.

Carolyn Korsmeyer is the author or editor of several books in aesthetics and philosophy of art, feminist philosophy, and emotion theory, including Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics (2011) and Things: In Touch with the Past (2019).

Of the five senses, two—sight and hearing—were higher and lent themselves to aesthetic perception, while the remaining three—touch, taste and smell—were lower and non-aesthetic senses. Korsmeyer, in this sensitive and judicious book, explores and exposes the errors misinforming this conventional ranking.... This is an illuminating book.

It is to Korsmeyer's credit... that she has presented so strong a version of a philosophy of interpretation and shown how well it can be applied to food. As she insightfully establishes, philosophical tradition has not been able to find a place for gustatory taste within its framework, and it is a virtue of Korsmeyer's eloquent little study that she establishes a strong possibility for a cognitively rich philosophy of food.

In this thoroughly researched, well-organized, tightly argued, clearly-written, and stylistic book, Carolyn Korsmeyer has presented enough food for thought to keep all but the most jaded aestheticians engaged for many happy hours.

Anyone who critiques philosophy's 'venerable preoccupation with the 'mind' over the 'body' and 'matters of universal concern over particular experiences,' should read this book for the approach Korsmeyer uses to make her argument. Personally, I would add that anyone who thinks, who thinks about eating or drinking, who who even eats or drinks, should read it, too.

A book about how the divergent histories of taste and Taste have left us with an impoverished understanding of the former—and thus a deep skepticism about the aesthetic worth of food. Carolyn Korsmeyer suggests that her project will illuminate readers' understanding of food—and observes that it might well illuminate our understanding of art as well. She succeeds on both counts.

Martha C. Nussbaum, Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics, Philosophy, Law, and Divinity, The University of Chicago:

Although we love to talk about food, the sense of taste has rarely been the subject of philosophical analysis. Denigrated as primitive, crude, bestial, and epistemically obtuse, taste has been ignored in favor of vision and hearing, which strike philosophers as nobler, less mixed up with our messy animality. Carolyn Korsmeyer's elegant and witty analysis undermines these stereotypes, challenging philosophy to take account of phenomena that the best writers about food have always known. She argues cogently that taste has complex object-directed intentionality and cognitive content; that food can have many of the properties of a work of art; that eating involves complex forms of symbolic activity. Drawing on science, literature, anthropology, and feminist theory, this exhilarating book is a paradigm of interdisciplinary philosophical analysis.