The Australasian Association of Philosophy conference next year will be held on the Great Barrier Reef. A proto-website for the conference is here. The AAP is always a great conference, and if you’re going to go to it once in your career, I think when it’s on the Reef would be a great time to go.

For a description of the quality of the conference, I can’t beat Bill Lycan’s testimony: (original here)

” Here is a revealing comparison. For the annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association the Program Committee sifts submissions carefully and rejects 80 percent. The Australasian Association of Philosophy does not sift submissions. Yet every year the AAP program is better overall than the APA program. ”

If conferences are to be in winter, I think it’s a good idea to have them near the equator. In Australia we seem to get this right, having the conferences fairly frequently in Queensland. In America, the APA Eastern is usually in some place that’s utterly miserable in late December, like Washington or Boston. These are fine cities, but really couldn’t we do better for a December conference venue? It might be stretching the notion of Eastern a little to have the conference in New Orleans (and I think there is already a big conference there b/w Christmas and New Year), but I don’t see why we don’t have the Eastern conference in Miami.