The American Society for Aesthetics held its Eastern Division meeting on April 13th and 14th at the Best Western Independence Park Inn in Old City Philadelphia. About 60 people from all over the country as well as from Canada, Britain, and New Zealand attended the meeting. Robert Fudge (Weber State University) and Saam Trivedi (Brooklyn College) served as Program Co-Chairs.

The program for the meeting was both rich and varied. It featured sessions on standard topics in aesthetics such as defining art, interpretation, ontology, art and morality, literature, fiction and imagination, visual arts, Hume’s aesthetics and Kant’s aesthetics. Additionally, the program had several sessions on topics seldom discussed at ASA meetings such as architecture, aesthetic universals, and neuroaesthetics.

On the evening of Saturday, April 14th, Robert Stecker (Central Michigan University) delivered the plenary lecture on “Immoralism and the Anti-Theoretical View,” which was followed by a lively reception and later a performance by the jazz band, The Aesthetic Attitude, at the French restaurant Patou. On the prior evening, George Dickie (University of Illinois, Chicago) gave the annual Beardsley lecture at Temple University on “The Journey to Aesthetic Experience.”

David Clowney (Rowan University) and William Seeley (Franklin and Marshall College) will organize next year’s meeting. We are happy to turn things over to their able hands, having organized two successive meetings ourselves, and wish them all the best.

Robert Fudge
Saam Trivedi