Prior to the beginning of the academic year in the Autumn of '56, at Amherst College President Charles Cole's reception for incoming freshmen and new faculty members, I found myself standing next to a most distinguished-looking, pipe-smoking individual who introduced himself as W.E. Kennick of the Philosophy Department, newly arrived from teaching at Oberlin College. An indication of my own naivete at that time was that, when he said that his special interest was aesthetics, I had no idea what the word meant—'tho of course I was too embarrassed to say so. As evidenced in his eloquent lectures on the History of Philosophy, Bill Kennick’s incandescent intellect was considered inspiring by all of his students across the years. When someone in class once asked for the fallacy in Berkeley's argument that ‘matter’ is a meaningless term, since one perceives only qualities and never—by definition—a substratum, he replied: ‘There's no fallacy; it's quite a valid argument!’, which quite astonished us all. Later, while I was studying in London, he came there to live during a half-year sabbatical, when I had a better opportunity to know both him and his charming wife Nancy (who I believe had once been one of his students at Oberlin). No one among the renowned scholars that I encountered among British academics during my graduate studies in England was his equal in clarity of thought and expression. His celebrated article in the British philosophical journal Mind, ‘Does Traditional Aesthetics Rest on a Mistake?’, remains a paradigm of incisive philosophical thought, a supreme example of how one single work can surpass entire volumes by lesser minds. May he dialogue with the worthies in Paradise! —TPB