At Kenyon College, when I was an undergraduate (from 1957 to 1961), my friends and I argued hard about philosophical texts and issues, and we each spent many hours trying to think through the proper interpretation of these texts. A great deal of the stimulus for our discussions came from the seminars and other classes that Virgil Aldrich was running, as well as from his own present and past ideas on beauty as feeling, pictorial meaning and picture thinking, categorial ways of perceiving, and aesthetic experience. In presenting these ideas — and in his development of their descendants today — Aldrich has often appeared to me almost as a Socratic figure, compelling one's attention with, as it is said in the Symposium, "nothing but a few simple words". Like Socrates, he has refused to allow sophisticated theories to overrun basic truths, and yet he has not hesitated to suggest views of resonance and breadth.