The International Institute of Applied Aesthetics (Lahti, Finland) in association with the Nordic Society for Aesthetics and the Finnish Society for Aesthetics will arrange the 2010 annual conference of the Nordic Society for Aesthetics in Lahti, Finland. The theme of the conference is "Environment, Aesthetics, and the Arts."

The environment has been a focus of increasing interest within aesthetics for the last decades. At the same time, there has been growing recognition that the term "environment" has come to have multifarious meanings, referring not solely to natural environments but also to forms of human environment. This recognition has revealed a wide array of questions which the notion of environment raises for aesthetics.

Focus on the environment has led also to an enlargement of the scope of aesthetics to include questions which have initially been raised in such fields as environmental and architectural studies, ecology, cultural geography, and sociology. This enlargement has increased the potential impact of aesthetics on other academic subjects.

Another issue which growing interest in the environment and the resultant expansion of the field of aesthetics have brought to light is the relationship between aesthetics and ethics. What, for example, is the relationship between aesthetic and moral values? Is ethics the mother of aesthetics, or is it, ultimately, the other way around? These questions do not concern merely environmental aesthetics, as the relationship between aesthetics and ethics comes into play in a large group of questions in the philosophy of art as well. Recently, empirical and naturalist approaches taking inspiration from evolutionary theories of human cognition have been offered to answer such questions, and these types of answers have had some impact in aesthetics.