“Philosophy instructor honored at ACC” plus 1 more |
| Philosophy instructor honored at ACC Posted: 12 Feb 2011 12:39 AM PST Philosophy instructor Jeff Broome has been selected as the Arapahoe Community College faculty member of the year by the ACC Faculty Senate. Broome will be recognized Feb. 9 at a State Board for Community Colleges and Occupational Education meeting. Broome came to ACC in 1985. During his time at the college, Broome has been instrumental in building the philosophy department. He was the primary writer of the model philosophy syllabi for many of ACC's philosophy courses and created the school's philosophy club. In addition, he pioneered a course in philosophy of religion based on the work of theologian John Hick and was one of the first faculty members to convert his classes to an online format, while also making his lectures available for students to download on iTunes. "I am honored to be selected as faculty of the year and grateful to my fellow faculty members who voted me to this position and especially to my students who have made my career at ACC such a rewarding experience," Broome said. Broome has been an active member on numerous committees at the college as well as the Colorado Community College System's State Faculty Curriculum Committee. He has published more than 20 academic articles and several books, including "Dog Soldier Justice: The Ordeal of Susanna Alderdice in the Kansas Indian War" and "Custer into the West."Born in Pueblo, Broome earned his bachelor's degree from Colorado State University at Pueblo, his master's degree from Baylor University and his doctorate degree in philosophy from University of Colorado at Boulder. Prior to coming to ACC, Broome worked as a detention counselor with the Arapahoe County Sheriff's Department and as the treatment director and chaplain for the Salvation Army Adult Rehabilitation Center in Denver. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
| The philosophy of wine - aethetics, taste and smell Posted: 04 Feb 2011 11:43 PM PST Alan Saunders: Hello, Alan Saunders with you for an alcohol-fuelled edition of The Philosopher's Zone. SONG Alan Saunders: Yes, and as The Youngbloods sang back in the 1960s, 'A glass of muscatel sets my mind up well'. Or does it? Wine is much more than a convivial beverage shared among friends, as you'll know if you've ever read a wine review. I mean does this wine really have notes of chocolate, truffle and violets? Can wines really be feminine, pretentious or cheeky? Can wines express emotion, or anything else for that matter? Do the judgments of experts have any objective validity or is your taste as good as mine and anybody else's? SONG Alan Saunders: To put all these questions in more philosophical terms: are the senses of taste and smell as structured as sight? What is the role of metaphor in the language of taste and smell? Is the production of tastes and smells an expressive art, and can objective statements be made about these things? Cain Todd is our guest this week. He's a lecturer in philosophy at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom and the author of The Philosophy of Wine: A Case for Truth, Beauty and Intoxication. Cain, welcome to The Philosopher's Zone. Cain Todd: Thank you very much for having me, it's a delight to be here. Alan Saunders: I think it's reasonable to call your book pioneering, because at the moment, any philosophical writing about wine counts as pioneering. But there is certainly a lot more of it around than there used to be, isn't there? Cain Todd: That's absolutely right. It's very kind of you to call my book pioneering, but in fact it really rests on the shoulders of a number of other books that, as you say, have recently been written on wine. There's something of a burgeoning interest amongst philosophers, but also amongst psychologists, and even neuro-scientists, in our taste and smell capacities. And in particular in wine, as the pre-eminent object that calls upon those capacities to discriminate and judge it. Alan Saunders: One of the factors that might in the past have stood in the way of philosophical writing on this subject is that wine is all about taste and smell. I mean, we are interested in what it looks like, and we hold the glass up to the light, but basically you don't just want to look at it, you want to taste it and you want to smell it. And for centuries, for philosophers, the one sense with which they were obsessed, was sight. Cain Todd: Yes, that's absolutely right. And of course there's good reason for that obsession, because we are essentially visual creatures. We navigate primarily by sight, I think most of us intuitively would think that sight is our pre-eminent sense, the most important sense that we have, and one that we'd be the most loath to give up. So in some senses, there are very good reasons for this obsession over the centuries with sight. But it has of course meant that there's been an almost complete neglect of most of the other senses until relatively recently. Of course people have always been interested in sound as well, because music and speech of course, have such prominent roles in our life. But until very, very recently, most philosophers have not said anything at all really about our senses of taste and smell. And when they have said anything about them, it's mostly been rather disparaging. So they've held that they can't be structured in a way that sustains intellectual or aesthetic interest, and most people intuitively think (philosophers amongst them) that our abilities for taste and smell are just far too impoverished to spend much time dwelling philosophically on. Alan Saunders: An issue here is that sight, and also hearing, is held to be representational. Sight represents to us something that is independent of our sight. It exists, whether we see it or not. But taste and smell, it's said, don't represent anything, they're just chemically stimulated experiences that exist only in our bodies. Cain Todd: Yes, that's absolutely right. This is actually quite a murky area of philosophy, and as we speak actually, there are more and more philosophers working on this notion of what representation action is in perception. So it's something of a hot topic and something of a topic of debate. But intuitively the basic idea is simply that in vision we're presented with a world that seems to be independent of us. Moreover, it's a very informationally rich world that vision gives us, full of different properties, full of different objects, and vision's very good at individuating those objects. So our visual sense, as it were, represents the world to us as consistent of a vast array of objects with lots of properties attached to them, in a way that allows us to discriminate and individuate individual objects. And moreover it appears to us in our actual experience of the world that those objects are the way they are, independently of us existing in the world, in some sense with a figure ground distinction, so that we can differentiate parts of the world and operate spatially around the world, through sight. So sight is a very informationally-rich sense that allows us to get about the world very effectively, that's right, and you might think that smell doesn't have those properties. Alan Saunders: Well one very sceptical conclusion that we might draw from this, is that there is simply no such object as 'the real wine'. Cain Todd: Yes, that's absolutely right. So one way of pursuing this idea that smells are not representational or perhaps not representational in the way that, say, sight is, is to think that rather than being perceptions of an external reality, they're merely sensations. So when we smell, the object of our smelling, in some sense, in us, I mean it's a chemical property that is in our nose or our brain, depending on how you think about that. And if that's the case, then you might say that when you're smelling even a complex object like wine, in some sense what you're smelling is really just sensations. I mean they're the object of your olfaction. And so there's no real way in which if there is a wine object out there in the world, then it would be difficult to say that we're smelling that as it really is independently of how we smell it. But of course everything here depends on what you mean by the wine object. So I think putting it that way is not very clear, because one might say, Well, even if you're a subjectivist about our sensations of olfaction and gustation, you might say, Well the wine object still of course is as commonsense tells us, there is a bottle of liquid there, full of chemical properties and volatile compounds. So in some sense, that is obviously an object, and we might call that the wine object. But if you want to refer to the wine object as that object consisting of our experiences of it as wine, and bearing the sort of elaborate descriptions that people are wont to give to wine, then in that case, if you're subjectivist about smell and taste, you might think then, Well there's not much to the wine object other than our subjective experiences of it. And then there might be as many wine objects as there are people if our smell and taste experiences are all very individual and subjective. Alan Saunders: Well that's what I was going to come on to. Even if there is a real wine, is there only one? Are you and I, with our different tastes and different degrees of experience really tasting the same wine? Our experiences of the wine are likely to be different, whereas we're quite likely to agree on what the bottle that it came in looks like. Cain Todd: Right. This is a very difficult question to answer briefly and simply, because it bears a lot on the tricky philosophical notions to do with the nature of objectivity and subjectivity, and how we can actually know about any of our experiences, not just the taste and smell experiences, whether we share them. So one might be a radical sceptic about these kinds of claims to knowledge of other people in general. But I think it's safe to say that there is a broad knowledge of the kind of chemicals and compounds that make up even as complex an object as wine, although there's no definite list of all of them, of course. And we can give a pretty good story about how we causally, physiologically interact with a lot of these properties. So I suggest that's a kind of continuum of states here. I mean there are some states where if the wine has a particular chemical like brettanomyces in it, then it's safe to say that the majority of human beings will smell that, as having a kind of leathery smell to it. Alan Saunders: Well I'll come on to complex evaluative judgments in a minute, but would it be fair to say that we've over-estimated the representational character of sight, and underestimated the representational character of taste and smell? Cain Todd: That's a very good question. I'm not sure whether we've other-estimated the representational characteristics and capacities of sight. I think it's certainly true that we've under-estimated or at least misconstrued the representational capacities of at least smell, and perhaps taste as well. So one might very plausibly argue that smell, no less than sight, gives us access to the world. We can tell a very good evolutionary story about how smell can be informationally rich in human beings and is as fact informationally, very rich in other creatures, and so is an effective informational mechanism, has an informational function if you like, that enables us to get by in the world. And as for its ability to represent, there don't seem to be any very good arguments of thinking that it can't represent. Most philosophers think it can't represent, or that its representational powers are very poor, because they think at least implicitly if not also explicitly, simply about the complexity that attaches to our visual representations of the world. But even if you accept that vision gives us more information about the world, is informationally richer, and has a structure to experience consisting of a number of dimensions that smell doesn't, that by itself does not show that smell is not representational. But also part of the problem here is that the very notion of the representational content of perception is a pretty nebulous, pretty vague notion, and there's a lot of dispute, even amongst philosophers working essentially in this area, about exactly what it means. So I think it's not much more than prejudice that has really explained why philosophers think that smell is not representational in the way that sight can be. Alan Saunders: On ABC Radio National, you're with The Philosopher's Zone, and I'm sharing a philosophical conversation about wine, though sadly not a drink, with Cain Todd from Lancaster University. Cain let's turn now to the language in which we talk about wine. There's a famous cartoon by James Thurber in which a man with a glass in his hand is saying to his fellow diners, 'It's a naive domestic burgundy without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.' Now that's meant to be a joke, but it's only slightly a caricature. Metaphor: na�ve, breeding, presumption, seems unavoidable when we talk about wine, doesn't it? Cain Todd: I think that's right. A lot of philosophers have been skeptical about, and a lot of non-philosophers of course, have been sceptical about the sorts of language we use to describe wines, partly because they think that smells and tastes, partly for the reason we've just been discussing, are just not the kinds of things that can bear these elaborate metaphorical, evaluative kinds of descriptions. But if you think about it, the way we talk about almost anything is riddled with metaphor. So the use of metaphorical language is not in itself something we should be sceptical about, or worried about. And the question is really whether this bottle of liquid that contains volatile compounds is just the kind of thing that can be metaphorically described in the way that critics are wont to describe it. So that's one thing. And it's true that because we don't have a very well-developed vocabulary for describing taste and smell, certainly nothing that corresponds to our description of, say, colours, then really the reliance of metaphor is inevitable, and metaphorical leaps of the imagination if you will, occur pretty quickly when we're trying to describe complex gustatory objects like bottles of wine. Alan Saunders: Well yes, metaphor does seem inevitable, but it functions in a particular way here. If I'm talking metaphorically about, for example, politics, I might say that Parliament has become a war zone. But that's a metaphor that I can translate into literal language. I can say, 'Well what I mean is that parliamentary debate has become very loud and angry. But when we apply metaphors to our experience of wine, we seem to be saying something that we can't say in any other way. We can use different metaphors, but we will still need to use metaphors. Cain Todd: I think that's right. But it's a complicated area, because some things that appear metaphorical in wine language, I don't think are best thought of as metaphorical. Or if they are metaphorical, they can be cashed out in ways that are no more obscure than the kinds of example you've just given. So take for example, terms like 'flabby' to describe a wine. Well you might say that wines cannot literally be flabby, because flabby just doesn't - it's not the kind of concept you can just apply to a sort of liquid or an experience of gustation. But flabby really has become conventionalised to the point where at least amongst connoisseurs and experts, it's simply used to describe the lack of body in a wine which you can detect on the palate, that usually refers to a lack of acidity. So the wine is unbalanced, and therefore flabby because it lacks backbone. Now of course these are all sort of metaphors as well. But we can reduce a lot of these metaphors to pretty much basic literal descriptions of properties that the wine has, in this case, a lack of acidity. Of course we can't purely cash it out that way, because one needs to experience what that means. So if you've never drunk wine and saying that it lacks body because it lacks acidity, won't mean anything to you. But I don't think metaphorical descriptions of wine suffer in this respect in relation to any other feature of our metaphorical language, any other realm of discourse that uses metaphors. Alan Saunders: And you want to argue that the boundary between the metaphorical and the literal is relatively fluid and continuous? Cain Todd: Yes, I think that's right. I think there's a kind of continuum here. It's a question of degree, really. So there are some words that look metaphorical like flabby or perhaps like balanced, for instance, or having backbone for that matter, or being feminine. Some of those metaphors we can tie pretty much directly to descriptive, literal applications of language which describe perceptible properties of the wine. And those perceptible properties, it doesn't really take any expertise as such, to perceive. But I think we build up from that kind of base, to evaluate wines in quite complicated ways, and after all, they are very complex objects. And then we enter realms of metaphor and evaluation which are much more, if you like, loosely tied to those basic descriptable, perceptible properties of the object, and really refer to the kinds of experiences that we can have of those perceptible properties. And that's when metaphorical language becomes if you like, a bit wilder, and a bit looser, but nevertheless doesn't lose some kind of anchor to truthfulness, if it's used well. So even where we have elaborate metaphors like Jancis Robinson described a 2009 Cheval Blanc, she said 'It's almost like a child told to concentrate and do its piano practice.' Now you might think that's ridiculous and doesn't tell us very much about the wine. But actually it makes perfect sense of the wine, given the other things she says about it. And if you know quite a bit about Cheval Blanc and the 2009 vintage and so on, then you'll see that what she's getting at is that the wine, for a Cheval Blanc within a certain category is relatively restrained, quite serious, but has elements of prettiness to it that relieve the seriousness, if you like. So it's sort of like a serious child being playful on the piano. So I think it's a sort of apt metaphor. Or for instance people often describe Cahors wines as being like Gothic cathedrals. Now of course, literally they're nothing like Gothic cathedrals, but one can make sense of the metaphor in virtue of the perceptual properties of the wine, relative to other background factors that one might also know about the wine - different categories of judgments, and so on. Alan Saunders: Something we naturally want to know is whether our descriptions of wine, our evaluations of it, or our evaluative descriptions, can be objective. And here you invoke the great 18th century Scottish philosopher, David Hume. What does he have to tell us? Cain Todd: Well Hume's very useful in this area because he recognises on the one hand there's a kind of paradox - he's mostly talking about aesthetic judgments rather than judgments of taste and smell per se, but they're quite similar in salient respects. So Hume recognises that on the one hand these judgments we make about taste and smells, are subjective in the sense that there's a lot of disagreement about them. But on the other hand of course, all of our practices of communication concerning these objects, presupposes objectivity in the sense that there is also a lot of agreement about what constitutes a great work of art, or a great wine. What constitutes a wine that's well balanced? So on the one hand there's a lot of disagreement in individual judgments, and lots of reasons to think that our experiences differ between each individual, but on the other hand our practices of evaluation and ranking and discourse all seem to presuppose an element of objectivity and Hume's very useful, because he gives us ways of reconciling these two apparently completely opposite tendencies. And the basic idea is this: he tells us to look at colour judgments, and colour judgments are interesting because on the one hand colour is subjective, it depends on human beings to perceive colours in the way that we do, and so when we describe a chair as blue, the concept of blueness latches on to, refers to not just properties of the chair but also to our experiences of those properties. So our perceptions of colours are ineliminably response dependent, they're subjective in that sense. But of course we don't think that colour judgments are subjective, we think that people can be wrong and right about them to some degree. So we wouldn't trust a colour-blind person to tell us about the colours of the room that we're in. That is, we can give standards that are ground norms for the correctness of our colour judgments, even though colours depend on human beings and the way that they just happen to be contingently constituted for their perception. And Hume argues that we can think of judgments about aesthetic qualities and by extension taste and smells, similarly. Alan Saunders: He requires an ideal observer though, doesn't he? I mean in the case of wine, do we need an ideal taster? Cain Todd: Right, exactly. So colours are going to differ here, because colours, it just seems that most human beings are wired up in the same way so we all more or less perceive colours similarly, and that grounds the objectivity of our judgment you might say. Whereas wine of course, Hume himself says the properties are much harder to perceive, much more of a fine grained ephemeral, of course, taste itself, very ephemeral kinds of things. So unlike colours, you might think also in the case of aesthetic properties one needs to appeal to experts because one needs practice, one needs cultivation, one needs education, all sorts of things, in order to discern these kinds of properties. So you're right. Hume thinks or he propounds a kind of ideal observer theory for aesthetic qualities, and I think we need something similar to describe the norms that govern the correctness and therefore the objectivity of our judgments of wine. Alan Saunders: Just finally, a character in a novel by Kingsley Amis imagines owning a brewery, and promoting his brand with the winning slogan, 'Makes You Drunk'. Well, wine can make you drunk as well. Is there anything philosophical to be said for intoxication? Cain Todd: I think there is. I mean a person who's written with most insight about this is Roger Scruton, and I don't really have much more to add to what he's already done a great deal to outline here. But one important way of thinking about intoxication is this. Some intoxicating states can be produced by objects, like injected drugs for instance, or drugs taken in some other way, where the experience that we then have, whatever it might be, is not actually 'intentionally directed' as philosophers say, it's not anchoring, it doesn't have as its object the thing that caused the experience. Whereas the intoxication of objects like wine seem to be intentionally directed at and very firmly anchored in the object. So when we're intoxicated by wine, as a kind of causal mechanism, it's the wine itself that remains - at least in large part the object of our intoxication, and our intoxication has therefore a kind of intrinsic value to it, because it's bound up with the intrinsic values of the wine that enabled it. So that's the first thing to be said. The second thing to be said for intoxication, I think this is very interesting and philosophers would do well to work more on this, is that the kind of intoxication that goes especially with wine, and perhaps with other intoxicants, but the preeminently with wine I think, and there are good reasons for this which we probably don't have time to explore, is that it more than any other intoxicant enables a kind of - as philosophers have recognised throughout the centuries, and as a lot of commonsense suggest, enables virtues like sociability and sincerity and humour and graciousness, those kinds of basically moral virtues that allow us to communicate our experiences to others. So a lot of philosophers have thought that wine, more than any other object, actually in experience, part of its intoxicating quality is to give us some ability to open up to others, and to give some kind of insight into ourselves and the nature of shared experience, rather than just getting us stupefied, if you like. Alan Saunders: Well I'll drink to that, and I think a corollary of what you said is I shouldn't be drinking alone. Cain Todd: No, exactly. Alan Saunders: Cain Todd, thank you very much for joining us. Cain Todd: Thank you very much for having me, it's been a pleasure. Alan Saunders: Cain Todd lectures in philosophy at Lancaster University, and he's the author of The Philosophy of Wine - A case for truth, beauty and intoxication. Details on our website. The show is produced by Kyla Slaven, Charlie McKune is the sound engineer, I'm Alan Saunders and I'll try to weave my intoxicated way back to the studio next week. 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