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As humanity grapples with its significant global footprint in this era, there is a growing fascination with delving into the experiences and viewpoints of other animal species. This juncture offers an opportune moment to delve into the aesthetics of non-human animals by using diverse interdisciplinary methods and viewpoints. Insights of feminist aesthetics demonstrate how traditional understanding of aesthetics and aesthetic experience are heavily influenced by cultural assumptions about gender. Aesthetics as a humanistic discipline has determined the portrayal of non-human animals as beings with no capacity for aesthetic sensibility. In this thesis, I aim to bring to emergence the connection between human exceptionalist assumptions about aesthetics and the production of scientific knowledge about non-human animals. I defend the necessity of recognizing birds as beings with surprising and complex aesthetic sensibilities. Currently most scientists favor the adaptationist idea that the perception of beauty is influential in non-human animal lives only insofar as it serves to advertise fitness, and favor the reproduction and survival of the species. By weaving together insights from feminist philosophy of science and post-humanist studies of the human-animal bond, I present a framework capable of challenging human exceptionalist accounts of aesthetics. Particularly, I promote a methodology sensitive to the construction of gender in scientific portrayals of birds and their aesthetic preferences. I intertwine feminist critiques to pinpoint and challenge adumbrations of androcentrism in both animal sciences and aesthetics. Finally I examine, through an ungendered framework, instances of bowerbird behavior, and pinpoint aesthetic agency as an ability that we share in orchestration with other non-human animals. I conclude by proposing new avenues for research of non-human animal aesthetics.

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<p dir="ltr">This dissertation argues that shifting secular conversion therapy practices and theories in North America between 1910 and 1980 consistently relied on both queer affective experience and anti-queer and anti-trans animus to justify often brutalizing medical interventions. Canadian and American conversion therapists’ pathologizing views of queer sexual behavior and gender identity were shaped by complex interplays between cultural, legal, social, and medical perspectives, but predominately worked to uphold heteronormative social structures leading to discrimination, hate, and harm towards queer people in both countries. Focusing on affect thereby encourages scholars to recognize how conversion therapies in all their variable historical permutations are both medical <i>and </i>cultural practices that have attempted to use queer patients’ affective needs for acceptance, love, safety, and validation in ways advancing anti-gay and anti-trans social narratives in purportedly therapeutic settings since the early twentieth century.</p><p dir="ltr">This research uses a transnational approach that is at once sensitive to national differences between the American and Canadian queer experience while looking to draw connections between conversion therapy’s development and individual experiences of this practice in two national contexts over time. It additionally pays careful attention to the ways social power hierarchies based on race and class informed individuals’ affective experiences of conversion therapy between 1910 and 1980.</p>

This thesis addresses key issues of scientific realism in the philosophy of biology and chemistry through investigation of an underexplored research domain: olfaction theory, or the science of smell. It also provides the first systematic overview of the development of olfactory practices and research into the molecular basis of odours across the 19th and 20th century. Historical and contemporary explanations and modelling techniques for understanding the material basis of odours are analysed with a specific focus on the entrenchment of technological process, research tradition and the definitions of materiality for understanding scientific advancement. The thesis seeks to make sense of the explanatory and problem solving strategies, different ways of reasoning and the construction of facts by drawing attention to the role and application of scientific representations in olfactory practices. Scientific representations such as models, classifications, maps, diagrams, lists etc. serve a variety of purposes that range from the stipulation of relevant properties and correlations of the research materials and the systematic formation of research questions, to the design of experiments that explore or test particular hypotheses. By examining a variety of modelling strategies in olfactory research, I elaborate on how I understand the relation between representations and the world and why this relation requires a pluralist perspective on scientific models, methods and practices. Through this work I will show how a plurality of representations does not pose a problem for realism about scientific entities and their theoretical contexts but, on the contrary, that this plurality serves as the most reliable grounding for a realistic interpretation of scientific representations of the world and the entities it contains. The thesis concludes that scientific judgement has to be understood through its disciplinary trajectory, and that scientific pluralism is a direct consequence of the historicity of scientific development.

In Sweden, Bachelard is mostly known for his works about poetry and literature, but he was also very productive in philosophy of science. Having studied engineering and taught physical sciences, his main writings in this field concern contemporary physics. He developed the idea of “epistemological rupture”, closely linked to the concept of “epistemological obstacle”. Those notions show science in its historicity and are linked to the idea of progress: a progress that strives not only towards a better approximation of reality, but that can also be seen as a progress of the scientific mind itself. Epistemological ruptures take place when epistemological obstacles are defeated. It is when an epistemological obstacle is met that the ways of thinking that prevents progress become visible; it needs to become an obstacle before we can get rid of it, which causes not only a more precise knowledge, but also a restructuration of the scientific mind. This way, epistemological rupture do not only refer to a historical process, but also to a psychological one. In The formation of the scientific mind, Bachelard shows, through examples taken from history of science, the path that each “scientific mind” has to travel. He analyses science with the aim of finding in its history a history of thought and of its progress: therefore, in The formation of the scientific mind, he gives the same status to the errors of the high school students, as to the ways of thinking that have impeded or slowed down sciences’ developments. By stressing the importance of history, Bachelard insists on the psychological aspects of the constitution of science: as much as it is absurd to try to understand an answer without knowing the question it replies to, it is not possible to cut knowledge from its context of emergence, or to understand an object of study without referring to the subject that constituted it. Thus, Bachelard emphasises the importance of the subject in science, but without making of science something subjective, or without falling into psychologism. The reference to the scientists’ subjectivity is not, for Bachelard, a way of questioning the validity of the scientific discourse; on the contrary, it is by describing science in terms of the scientist’s mind and psychology that Bachelard will find the grounds for science’s objectivity and its success. Bachelard shows science as a practice, as a training of the mind, as an effort involving a lot more than mere rationality, thereby destroying the myth of a universal reason as an underlying principle in the construction of science. / En Suède, Bachelard est surtout connu pour ses travaux sur la poésie et la littérature, mais il a été tout aussi productif en épistémologie. Ayant étudié et enseigné les sciences physiques, ses principaux écrits dans ce domaine concernent la physique contemporaine. Il a développé le concept de « rupture épistémologique », lié à celui d’ « obstacle épistémologique ». La notion d’obstacle épistémologique montre la science dans son historicité ; elle est liée à l’idée de progrès : un progrès qui recherche non seulement une meilleure approximation de la réalité, mais qui peut aussi être compris comme un progrès de l’esprit scientifique lui-même. Ce progrès est accompli lors de ruptures épistémologiques, c’est-à-dire lorsqu’un obstacle épistémologique est vaincu : c’est à ce moment que ce qui empêche la pensée d’avancer devient visible, ce qui cause non seulement une connaissance plus précise, mais aussi une restructuration de l’esprit scientifique.       De cette manière, le concept de rupture épistémologique ne réfère pas seulement à un processus historique, mais aussi à un processus psychologique. Dans La formation de l’esprit scientifique, Bachelard donne des exemples pris de l’histoire des sciences et montre, à travers elles, le cheminement que chaque « esprit scientifique » doit accomplir. Il analyse la science avec le but  de trouver dans son histoire, une histoire de la pensée et de ses progrès : c’est pour cela que Bachelard, dans son livre La formation de l’esprit scientifique, compare le développement des sciences au niveau historique avec l’apprentissage des sciences au niveau individuel, et fait souvent référence aux erreurs des lycéens autant qu’aux bévues historiques. Ainsi, Bachelard met en lumière l’aspect construit des sciences : pour autant qu’il soit absurde d’essayer de comprendre une réponse sans connaître la question à laquelle celle-ci répond, il est impossible de couper la connaissance de son contexte d’émergence, ou d’essayer de comprendre un objet d’étude sans référer au sujet qui l’a constitué. Il ne s’agit pas pour autant faire de la science quelque chose de subjectif ou de tomber dans le psychologisme. La référence à l’esprit du savant ou à l’intersubjectivité scientifique n’est pas, pour Bachelard, un moyen de questionner la validité du discours scientifique ; au contraire, c’est en décrivant la science grâce à la psychologie du savant que Bachelard montre la science comme une pratique, comme un entrainement de l’esprit, comme un effort impliquant bien plus que la simple rationalité, détruisant de ce fait le mythe d’une raison universelle comme principe sous-jacent de la construction des sciences.