Mind Versus Stomach: The Philosophical Meanings of Eating

Abstract

Ray Boisvert has started with his book an ambitious project to rethink the most important disciplines of philosophy from the stomach not from the mind. The stomach comprises an intrinsic connection with nature, people, and everything else that contributes to feeling well. The book presents a sometimes joyous and mostly very serious celebration of what eating can bring us in doing philosophy. The blurb text on the back cover claims: ‘Building on the original meaning of philosophy as love of wisdom, it explains how the search for wisdom can best succeed by addressing not just the mind, but the entire human being. Eating, an activity that integrates physiological, social, religious, cultural, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions, offers an opportunity to re-think fundamental questions. The result: surprising and novel ways to approach art, religion, knowledge, ethics, and even democracy.’ Well, let’s see what it is all about with these claims. A start is made in the first chapter with a glance on the history of philosophy where a first inventory is made of philosophers that aim at detached, universal and ideal knowledge and the ones that perceive the human being as ‘convive’, as immersed in the natural and social world (p. 19). This the first of many passages where Boisvert creates new words to make his claims real, next to quoting and rephrasing passages from novels of for instance Camus, Chaucer, Fielding or Forster, proposing recipes and etymological detours. The second chapter, hospitality, starts with feeding the stranger, than goes to the question hoe wide is the circle of we?’(24) and then discusses hospitality in religion and philosophy. In this last section Boisverts develops first a sharp distinction between hospitality according the Modern paradigm, where hospitality is a kind of