![\"Beer](\"http:\/\/www.appellationbeer.com\/images\/20071106-philosophy.jpg\")
Would you trust a philosopher with your beer?<\/p>\nWould you trust a philosopher with your beer?<\/p>\n
Is that in itself a philosophical question?<\/p>\n
To tell the truth, even though I was careful to bite off portions of the book in small chunks, after reading Beer and Philosophy: The Unexamined Beer Isn’t Worth Drinking<\/a> Which is not to say I didn’t enjoy myself throughout.<\/p>\n This is a great collection for a book club to tackle. Read a chapter a week and discuss at the local pub. After after finishing this book the club could move onto to the other two in this “Epicurean Trilogy,” Food & Philosophy<\/a> And after that? Southpark & Philosophy<\/em> and 24 & Philosophy<\/em> should be out. Really. It seems publisher Wiley-Blackwell has quite a franchise going here.<\/p>\n Philosophers who have a certain affection for beer wrote most of the essays. There’s also Alan McLeod from A Good Beer Blog <\/a>representing the blogosphere, as well as philosophical brewers Sam Calagione and Garrett Oliver. <\/p>\n The topics include many — quality, pricing, authenticity, etc. — that pop up here. Also some you don’t see in your basic beer blog. Such as an inspection of Immanuel Kant’s transcendental idealism through beer goggles.<\/p>\n I particularly liked editor Steven D. Hales contribution. He uses the philosophy of John Stuart Mill to examine this question: If you had $30 to spend on beer, would you be better off spending it on a single case of Pilsner Urquell or two cases of Miller Lite? Don Russell recently covered this in nice detail<\/a>. Take a look and come back. Carefully consider Hale’s argument that quality is the density of pleasure<\/em>. Could be a New Beer Rule<\/a>.<\/p>\n And if you don’t have a book club to share thoughts with? Jeff Alworth<\/a> has suggested this book will provide blogging fodder for quite a while. I have to agree.<\/p>\n Perhaps that’s what Michael Jackson was predicting in the foreword (a delightful surprise to find at the outset) when he wrote: “When I grow up, I want to be a philosopher.”<\/p>\n As Hales points out in his introduction it all comes down to Plato — degrees Plato or the guy who keeps popping up in this book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Would you trust a philosopher with your beer? Is that in itself a philosophical question? To tell the truth, even though I was careful to bite off portions of the book in small chunks, after reading Beer and Philosophy: The Unexamined Beer Isn’t Worth Drinking I’m not exactly sure about either. I seem to have … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4wTn-65","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=377"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=beertravelers&l=ur2&o=1\")