Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy

Volume 1, 2018

Aesthetics and Philosophies of Art

Food and Philosophy Through José Vasconcelos’s Aesthetics

Food is an essential part of human life; it shows the most elementary way of socializing and mixing elements for them to reach the most pleasure possible. But that is not enough to defend food as aesthetically relevant. Vasconcelos’s aesthetics introduce the concepts of harmony, proportion and experience to make a defense of the sense of taste. His purpose is to show that pleasures in food go beyond the necessity of eating. When searching for pleasure itself, the end of eating changes and leaves the alimentary aspect as mere accidental. These pleasures are related with the way the ingredients are cooked and disposed on the table, not only revealing the aesthetic part of the sense of taste, but also the social and anthropological root of human nature.