Can a Views Block receive arguments?

I have a views block created to list article which are featured (promoted to frontpage). But I would like to have it filtered by the taxonomy id each time a user browse further down the hierachy.

Imagine a website with:
Food
-- Fruits
---- Apple
---- Orange

Say if I'm at Food, it will show featured articles from all categories under it. And if it is Fruits, it will filter the featured articles to only those in Fruits.

This is also related to my other question regarding recursive listing of nodes under the taxonomy listing at
http://drupal.org/node/107931.