The seventy-ninth annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division) was held recently, as is traditional, in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day. This year’s meeting was held in Baltimore at the new Convention Center, which is part of that city’s recently completed harborside development—a copy of Boston’s Quincy Market—of office towers, hotels, restaurants, and shops. The sixteen hundred professors and graduate students spent much of their free time between seminars and cocktail parties wandering through the boutiques and food stands in the green-roofed glass pavilions nearby.
When they returned to the Convention Center the scene looked remarkably similar, for there is nothing an academic convention resembles so much as a Middle-East bazaar. Special-interest groups are given space to hawk their wares—pamphlets, books, magazines, buttons, and now video tapes. This sort of trade was less oppressive than the large number of symposia offered by these organizations. Indeed, from the official program one could be forgiven for concluding that the APA convention is only an annual pavilion in which these groups congregate.
Three sorts of independent groups exist to offer symposia: specialized scholarly societies, pop-philosophy groups, and political organizations. The scholarly societies have long been a staple here and serve the important function of keeping the study of the history of philosophy alive within the APA. One could sit in on a discussion of Pico della Mirandola held by the International Society for Neoplatonic Studies, or attend meetings of the Kierkegaard Society, the World
