Current debates on food ethics, corporeality, and the good life are shaped by interplays between gastric and mental digestion. But the history of occidental philosophy also abounds with questions of digestion. There is an enormous thematic diversity, and bitter disputes of opinion are not rare. Christian W. Denker takes up characteristic motifs of this history of concepts, from Pythagoras, Plato, Epikur, Philo, Montaigne, Diderot, Kant, Lichtenberg, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein, Foucault, Searle, and Derrida, and on the one hand shows how the meaning of digestion for philosophical explanations regarding knowledge, actions, and judgments of sensual perception has developed from the original connection of language and stomach. On the other hand, he makes clear how scientific, religious, and artistic images both concretely and symbolically enrich the everyday treatment of stomachs.
