The Australasian Association of Philosophy has just made one of its occasional ventures off-shore, to combine with the New Zealand Association to host a joint conference in Wellington, New Zealand, 8-12 July.

Wellington welcomed the conference with two days of gales that were impressive by every standard except those of Wellington, and that caused some initial misfires as the conference got underway. Despite the welcome, the conference went well, and the ANU detachment was by far the largest, with papers from Renee Bolinger ,Heather Browning , Lachlan Walmsley, Devon Cass, Alex Sandgren & Koji Tanaka, Shang Lu, Anton Killin, Matt Spike, Toby Solomon, Justin D'Ambrosio , Jessica Isserow , Matthew Hammerton, Kim Sterelny, Susan Pennings, Daniel Stoljar and Alan Hájek.

A major highlight was Helen Browning snaring the graduate student award for a paper on the gnarly problem of comparing welfare across different species: a problem that zoos, in particular, cannot escape. Amongst the three others short-listed was ANU’s own Lachlan Walmsley, continuing his series of papers on the challenges of understanding the science of complex systems, and the role of different forms of models in understanding those systems.

The ANU presence at the preceding Wellington Empirical Philosophy Workshop (the fifth in a series initiated by Anton Killin in his Wellington days) was even more marked, with papers by Anton himself, Lachlan, Matt Spike and Justin D'Ambrosio.