The British Society of Aesthetics Annual Conference 2011

The 2011 Annual Meeting was held at the University of Edinburgh’s Old College on September 16 to 18. Fifty-seven papers had been submitted and the program featured fifteen of these, including eight papers authored by postgraduate students. The  outstanding postgraduate paper prize was taken home by Kathy Fry, who spoke on “Nietzsche’s Aesthetics of Rhythm: Rethinking the Case of Wagner.” Two keynote addresses were delivered: Catherine Wilson’s “Grief and the Poet” challenged the fiction-centred paradigm in current philosophy of literature and Rachel Zuckert’s “Reid’s Expressivist Aesthetics” offered a sympathetic reading of the aesthetics of that Scottish philosopher. The William Empson Lecture is traditionally given by a non-philosopher. The distinguished art historian Stephen Bann sprinkled his lecture on “The Heroic with the Pastoral: Genre and Philosophy in the Making of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta” with remarks about his own visits to Little Sparta in the early years of its construction. The conference ended with an outing to Little Sparta, where Professor Bann led us on a tour. It began in a downpour and ended with views of the sunlit Pentland Hills.
Dominic McIver Lopes