Abstract

My association with Denis Dutton began almost exactly thirty years ago, at the 1981 American Society for Aesthetics (ASA) conference in Tampa, although in an inverse sort of way: he deliberately chose not to meet me.Let me explain. In late October 1981, I was a housewife living in Sri Lanka who certainly did not have the means to travel from South Asia to central Florida. The previous year, I had published a paper in the summer issue of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.1 Soon afterward, I received a letter in a somewhat shaky hand from a gentleman in New York, David Mandel, who identified himself as a former labor lawyer who was passionate about the subject of art and evolution, to the extent that he ..