This year’s meeting was jointly organized with the Monroe Beardsley Lecture, which was given at Temple’s Center City Campus in the evening of the 19th. This year’s Beardsley speaker was David Freedberg (Columbia) with a talk entitled “Empathy and Art: Adjusting the Neuroscientific Perspective.” Noël Caroll gave the ASA plenary lecture, presenting excerpts from his forthcoming work on humor and morality. The conference hosted two invited panels, on “Disgust” (Carolyn Korsmeyer, Gregg Horowitz, and William Day) and “Nietzsche and Art” (Bob Guay, Daniel Conway, Matthew Meyer, Randal Havas). There was also a submitted panel on Black Aesthetics (Luvell Anderson, Paul C. Taylor, Lindsey Stewart, and Sabrina Strings).

The number of excellent submissions continued to grow this year resulting in an acceptance rate of under forty percent. With more than eighty people officially registered, talks were very well attended. The twelve sessions were evenly divided between historical and contemporary topics and featured papers from the European as well as analytic strands of aesthetics. In addition to two sessions on German Aesthetics, there were sessions on “Aesthetics and Ethics,” “Artifice, Fiction, and Reading,” “Work, Trompe-l’oeil, and Medium,” “Everyday and Environmental Aesthetics,” “Fiction,” “Reason and Judgment,” and “Beauty, Profundity, and Shame in Music.”

Speakers and panel Chairs came from Europe (including Helsinki, Freie Universität, Berlin, Oxford), as well as Canada and the United States and included faculty and students alike.

A special thank should go to the graduate students from Temple for their continued assistance and help in making the Eastern Meeting a successful event. We would also like to thank those who served as the this year’s reviewers: Chris Bartel, John Caravalho, Brandon Cooke, Richard Eldridge, Cynthia Freeland, Alessandro Giovannelli, Theodore Gracyk, Espen Hammer, James Harold, Net Hettinger, Sherri Irvin, Andrew Kania, Paul Kottman, Jason Miller, Lara Ostaric, John Protevi, Charles Repp, Guy Rohrbaugh, Stephanie Ross, Aaron Smuts, Brian Soucek, and Thomas Wartenberg. Thanks to everyone for helping to make this a great weekend!

John Gibson
Jonathan Neufeld
Kristin Gjesdal