What's in a Doughnut Hole?

And Other Philosophical Food for Thought

Suki Finn

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2026
• eBook ISBN:
  9781785787928
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Does a doughnut hole exist? What makes a sandwich a sandwich? Can the baker, who only bakes for those who don't bake for themselves, bake for herself?

Using food to explore classic philosophical puzzles and paradoxes about how we know things, abstract ideas about our world, language and about how we define the truth, this book will get your brain whirring and your stomach grumbling.

Suki Finn, a Philosophy Lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London, serves up plenty of philosophical food for thought - enough to whet the appetite of the novice and to satisfy philosophers hungry for a different take on familiar themes. What's in a Doughnut Hole? gives us new ways to think about the world and to understand our place in it.

Table of contents

• Cover
• 0. Introduction: Appetisers
• 1. Doughnut Holes: On the reality of holes, their (im)materiality, and the presence of absence.
• 2. Nonexistent Noodles: On essence and existence, nonbeing, fictional artifacts, and what there is not.
• 3. Possible Eggs: On the nature of possible and impossible worlds, chance, and probability.
• 4. Which Wine Wins?: On the objectivity of taste, disagreement, and aesthetic and moral values.
• 5. Cheesy Chunder Chunklets: On the contents and context of disgust and the subjectivity of everyday aesthetics.
• 6. Hangover Fry-up: On sceptical doubt of who you are and what is real, and more musings on nothing.
• 7. Tapas Today, Tapas Tomorrow: On the problem of induction, reasoning, justification, and reliable inferences.
• 8. The Tasteless Chef: On the phenomenon of the phenomenal, consciousness, and transformative experiences.
• 9. The Village Baker: On self-referential paradoxes, contradictions, and the ascent to higher-order levels.
• 10. Sandwich Making: On conversational implicature, identity conditions, emptiness, and conceptual analysis.
• 11. Orange Oranges: On the existence of universals, properties, and being in two places at once.
• 12. Peas in a Pod: On multiple distinct things that are exactly alike and choosing between them.
• 13. The Potato and the Chips: On constitution and there being more than one thing in one place at one time.
• 14. Borderline Biryani: On the construction of vague objects, boundaries, and the problem of the many.
• 15. The Infinite Pizza: On the infinitely divisible yet finitely composed, and the different sizes of infinity.
• 16. Turducken Tower: On the question of when smaller things compose a bigger thing, and the unity of all.
• 17. Perpetual Soup: On time as the fourth dimension, persistence through change, and impermanence.
• 18. Ice-cream Envy: On the reality of time, free will, and the possibility of travelling through time.
• 19. Epilogue: Room for More?