I establish conceptual connections between food, the senses, and political life by drawing upon examples of gastropolitical moments which comprise charged meanings that may be unveiled through a closer inspection of the sensible. They reveal different power dynamics of cohesion and tension between varying sets of political actors. The senses aid in exemplifying political relationships and connections, directing us to particular aspects of political form and practice. This chapter therefore serves as a critical instigation of combining analytical approaches from sociology, anthropology, diplomacy, and food and foodways in appraising the importance of culinary–political encounters both within and between nations. Through such interdisciplinary conversations, it adopts a sensory reading and discussion of gastropolitical exchanges. Subsequently, my analysis is geared towards developing a political life of sensation that builds a theoretical and empirical connection between the political and the sensible. Such a sensory perspective explores the sociopolitical metaphors of taste and other accompanying sense experience. These are addressed through my proposed notion of political gustemology which I utilise in this chapter to illustrate the deployment of sensory knowledge and power in both actual sensorial exchanges and metaphorical takes on the sensory.

With special reference to Diotima’s teaching in Plato’s Symposium, this chapter discusses the central importance to Hermetic spirituality of beauty and reverence (eusebeia), Hermetic psychological theory, and the centrality of imagination to the Hermetic concept of “becoming aiōn” and gaining cosmic consciousness.

In this chapter I try to strengthen the results of the preceding chapter by looking at how Aristotle attempts to negotiate the issues identified there: whether knowledge is [1] “like by like” and [2] “alteration.” I argue that this is the work of De Anima II 5, a difficult text which has attracted a considerable literature, much of it animated by the question of whether Aristotle conceives of perceiving as something purely “spiritual.” Though I argue (as have others) that this question is not settled by II 5, my primary object is to present a reading on which its main business is to clarify the “grammar” of perception, so as to respect the fact that perception is of beings without rendering that fact unintelligible in principle. I argue that what the chapter says about the way perception is (and is not) a kind of alteration, and about the way it is (and is not) like by like, is as though designed to secure it that knowledge of beings is a fact that has causes.