Lecture
Friday, Dec 13, 2013, 4:30 PM

Harald Lemke

Wissen essen oder Die Weisheit eines guten Geschmacks

Traditional aesthetics regards taste as an inferior human sense. But the Latin word for wisdom (sapientia) reveals that taste (sapio) has a direct link to our highest cognitive faculty. This talk makes the case for understanding taste as a highly developed form of knowledge.

Harald Lemke has been on faculty at Lüneburg University since 2000 and at the Centre for Gastrosophy at the University of Salzburg since 2009. He earned his PhD in philosophy under the supervision of Axel Honneth in 1998 after completing study at the Jan van Eyck Academy for Art, Theory, and Design. From 1997 to 1999 he was a state delegate and spokesman in the area of culture policy for Hamburg’s Grün-Alternative Liste. He completed his habilitation in philosophy and cultural studies in 2006 with a grant from the Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt. Between 2004 and 2005 he was a visiting scholar at Kyoto University’s Graduate School of Global Environmental Studies. He has written extensively on gastrosophy and the art of eating, including Ethik des Essens: Eine Einführung in die Gastrosophie (2007), Die Weisheit des Essens (2008) and Die Politik des Essens: Wovon die Welt von morgen lebt (2012).