Finanziamento dell’UE NextGenerationEU PRIN PNRR 2022 – How Early Modern Ideas Shaped European Food Ethics - M4C2 investimento 1.1 Avviso 1409/2022

This interdisciplinary project breaks new ground in connecting historical debates on the philosophy of nutrition with contemporary ethical issues on nutritional well-being and the ecology of nutrition. Acknowledging that a specific reconstruction of early modern food ethics is still lacking, this project rediscovers the European intellectual and linguistic heritage in the fields of food culture, the ethics of nutrition, and nutritional well-being. The structure of our programme has three objectives. Objective I: We plan to investigate the relationship between diet and morality in early modern culture (16th-18th century), dwelling in particular on the role played by scientific and socio-political revolutions as drivers of change. Here we concentrate on three constitutive axes of classical ethics: the concepts of good and happiness, subjective dispositions, and the socio-political dimension. In WP1 we explore the problem of the moral dimension of diet, food, and nutrition as means for happiness, health, and longevity, and the effects of the scientific revolution on this issue, including the ‘artificiality’ of diet (one of Galen’s non-naturals) and of certain foods. In WP2 we investigate the relationship between nutrition, personal psychology, and individual dispositions, dealing with the reassessment of the notion of nutritional ‘appetites’ from the Aristotelian to the mechanical model, and considering individual sensory-aesthetic dispositions in dietary hedonism, and eating disorders. In WP3 we address a number of socio-political issues concerning the role of food as a liminal territory between classes and cultures, as well as between different visions of society, economy, and nature. Objective II: Here we explore early modern debates through qualitative and quantitative lexical analysis, in order to create, in WP4, a Lexicon of European Nutritional Ideas and Wellbeing. We connect the historical reconstruction with contemporary issues, testing the hypothesis that early modernity was the propulsive centre for the subsequent rise of philosophical interest in these issues, and simultaneously using contemporary problems as an original frame of reference for terminological reconstructions. This work is accomplished by selecting 10 categories from the contemporary debate on food ethics and extrapolating a range of corresponding early modern terms from a large pool of modern texts. Objective III: Accordingly, we employ a range of original disseminating and outreach activities in WP5. These span from the creation of an innovative platform to intense dissemination activities in schools, universities and business companies. As for academic dissemination, we plan to organize two international congresses and one seminar series, in addition to preparing for publication (in leading scholarly journals/series) at least 15 articles, 2 collective books, and 1 monograph, all in English.