Wisconsin – The ‘Food for Thought’ club, a student based philosophy dinner club made up of Madison area students hopes to have its very first dinner outing later this month. While any dinner club’s first meeting is cause for celebration, the Food for Thought Club has an added reason to be excited about their first dinner; It would be their first dinner after forming the club more than three years ago.
‘We had originally planned to meet out for dinner somewhere at least once a month’, says club president Andrew Wurton, ‘but we never expected to encounter the difficulties we’ve had in trying to decide a venue, date, time, or even the means and process by which to decide these things. I mean it took over 4 months just to decide that a majority vote would suffice to choose our club’s name.’
‘The problem was we just had too many conflicting philosophies in the club and went into it without a proper philosophy on what the club would be.
‘For example’, Wurton continued, ‘The anarchists didn’t want any rules. They just wanted to eat wherever the hell they felt like and if others showed up, well jolly good show then. Meanwhile the Utilitarian’s felt they couldn’t make a proper decision on a place to eat without first charting everyone’s happiness in relation to each item on a given menu. You know, Bob likes chicken but hates tacos, Mary really likes tacos but doesn’t care for steak, Frank doesn’t like Tacos, but just loves Steak. They spent weeks just trying to figure out which restaurant would provide the group with the greatest amount of utility, and then after we had chosen a place, we find out the restaurant had been out of business for like two weeks.’
‘After that it was back to square one. We had just about decided on a place again, when the Deontological Kantists got into it with each other on whether it was morally acceptable to eat at a place which served meat. This upset the utilitarians because they had created another chart which showed quite clearly that eating meat provided much more happiness to the group than strictly non-meat menus. Meanwhile we had this Cartesian rationalist who kept saying she couldn’t decide on a place until she truly came to ‘know the essence of the food’’.
‘So, after our second year anniversary, still without ever having a club dinner, I came up with the idea of a new philosophy called ‘philosophical dinnerism’. Basically it was a new philosophy with its focus purely on how to have a philosophy based dinner club.
The first step in creating any new philosophy is to clearly define your goal, which we defined as ‘Having members of the club choose a place and time to go eat and discuss philosophy, and then do so’. This hit a rough spot right away when our Cartesian rationalist kept questioning the existence of the rest of the club’s members. To resolve this issue we created the first tenet of philosophical dinnerism which states:
The question of the existence of the rest of the club shall be deemed irrelevant to the purpose of the club. For even if the rest of the club exists only in one’s mind, and are in fact figments of the subconscious mind, or illusionary imaginings brought into existence by some deceiving power or demon, these figments still posses the ability to engage oneself in philosophical conversations and reflection, which is a stated purpose of this club.’
‘That finally shut up the rationalist. Fucking Descartes!’, exclaimed Wurton.
‘Anyway, after we agreed on the first tenet we moved on to how we would decide which place to eat. This had always hit a snag with the utilitarians, so we created the second tenet of dinnerism which stated:
The Greatest amount of happiness (or utility) for the dinner club, comes about only by actually having a dinner out somewhere. Since this utility supersedes the individual food preferences of club members, the venue shall be chosen on a simple majority vote of its members.’
After creating these two tenets we were able to decide on a resteraunt in about 20 minutes. We’ll see how it goes next week, but I’m very excited about it. I mean after waiting three years, how can you not be?’
When asked if he foresaw any problems, Wurton replied, ‘I am a bit concerned what’s going to happen when it comes time to pay the bill. But I’ve got a couple ideas for a third tenet should it come to that…but we’ll see how it goes. Right now I’m just hungry.’