11 April 2025, 9am-5pm | Register Interest

We are delighted to be hosting this workshop on Thinking About Drinking on 11 April 2025. This is not a series of stand-and-deliver talks, but a world café inspired approach to developing interdisciplinary projects on philosophical aspects of drink, drinking, and alcohol use, misuse, and harms, arising in health, social, personal, and commercial contexts. Despite recent work in other disciplines on alcohol, we believe that philosophical work in this area remains underdeveloped. At the same time, conceptual frameworks in public health, psychology, and other areas are sometimes underdeveloped or partial. An opportunity exists to connect philosophical approaches to these conceptual needs for a project that is at once intellectually novel and impactful, and this workshop supports the development of such a project. Participants are drawn from academia (including philosophy, psychology, sociology, and pharmacology), public health, clinical practice, and industry in the UK, continental Europe, and sub-Sarahan Africa.

Background

Ever since humans began to consume alcohol, they have had a difficult relationship with it. Alcohol is a colorless liquid that has, in itself, no material, cultural, or moral value. But like many other commodities, it has been ascribed complicated and often contradictory sets of values that have varied over time and place, and that are interwoven with the complexities of power, gender, class, ethnicity, and age in the societies in which it is consumed. (Phillips 2014, 1)

So Rod Phillips begins his history of alcohol. Drinking is a well-established subject of study in the social sciences. Yet philosophical literature on alcohol and alcohol use is remarkably sparse across the spectrum of traditions. A small number of books have been written about alcohol and philosophy, often with jocular titles like “The Unexamined Beer is Not Worth Drinking” (Hales 2007) or “I Drink Therefore I Am” (Scruton 2009). There is a notable vein of work on the aesthetics of wine. Elsewhere, medical and public health ethicists have discussed issues related to, for instance, liver transplants for alcohol dependent individuals or justification of alcohol policies (e.g., Gavanagh 2009; John 2018). Addiction has been a topic for philosophers of science (e.g., Burdman 2021); yet the relationship between alcohol and the – relatively recent – concept of addiction may itself be scrutinised. Philosophical interest in drinking remains niche, and there is no defined philosophical literature on alcohol, drinking, or drink.

Yet philosophical questions about alcohol are central to contemporary developments in thinking about alcohol, although commonly left implicit. Here is a selection of such questions.:

• Is alcoholism a disease? What does/would this mean?
• Is “alcohol” the right or only conceptual framework within which to think about drinking, given the variety of alcoholic drinks, and their different functions for individuals and in different drinking cultures, past and present?
• Is “Alcohol Use Disorder” a medically valid category? Is it a spectrum? Is it value-laden? If so, with what values? How does it relate to alcoholism – a replacement, or a different concept?
• Is all alcohol consumption harmful (“no safe limit”)? In what sense – health, socially, morally?
• How should alcohol-related “harm” be conceptualized?
• What is an acceptable limit for alcohol consumption? What does “acceptable” mean – health, social consequences, morality? Or something else?
• How, if at all, should the longstanding spiritual significance of alcohol be accommodated in contemporary understanding? (Alcoholics Anonymous, the largest recovery programme, is a spiritual programme; alcohol has been regarded as connected to the divine, to truth, to the Devil; etc.)
• What are the connections between humour and alcohol? Why is it so common to joke about drinking, and behaviour related to drinking? What function does humour perform and what function does alcohol perform in provoking a humorous response even in its absence?

Sometimes, these questions are explicitly discussed, as in the psychology and self-help debate about whether alcoholism is a disease. At other times, answers are assumed, for instance in leaflets by the UK’s National Health Service stating “Like tobacco, alcohol is harmful” and urging everyone to drink less.

Questions such as the nature of health and disease, the role of values in concepts of health and in medicine, the significance and proper extent of medicalisation, the scope of mental health, and the conceptual implications and foundations of measurement in medical contexts are topics of lively philosophical discussion in philosophy of medicine, epidemiology, and public health.

Workshop Rationale

With a view to discussing the possibilities for collaboration on a funded project, the purpose of this workshop is to identify philosophical issues around drinking, by bringing together those thinking about drinking in academic, professional, health, and commercial contexts.

We hope the conversation will enrich all parties, and is the beginning of a lively, fruitful, and impactful philosophical tradition that combines academic and practical interests.

Organisers

The event will be hosted by the Centre for Philosophy of Epidemiology, Medicine, and Public Health (CPEMPH), part of the Institute for Medical Humanities (IMH).

Alex Broadbent      Director of CPEMPH, and Professor of Philosophy of Science at Durham University

Saana Jukola          Assistant Professor of Philosophy at University of Twente, Netherlands

Interested?

Register your interest in attending or following the outcomes of the workshop