This thesis is about the perceptual nature of aesthetic experience and the importance of nature as a paradigmatic object of aesthetic perception and aesthetic experience more broadly conceived. For this reason, it merits serious attention by philosophers working in aesthetics, as has been argued since Ronald Hepburn’s seminal essay “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty”. If aesthetic experience is anything, it is at least perceptual. It is a mode of perceptual experience that is the result of having been attentive to and having discriminated between, the aesthetic and non-aesthetic, and invites room for reflection on, and connections to be made with, cognitive and emotive processes. Rooting the aesthetic in perception allows us to recognize and understand that it has an impact on our daily activities, rather than being restricted either to a particular kind of object, to the knowledge we might have about it, or to intense, rarefied aesthetic experience. If an object is to be an aesthetic object it need not be an artwork, indeed, one might even argue that nature is more interesting an aesthetic object from the perspective that it is indeterminate, not the result of human intentionality, and from an existential point of view, one that acknowledges our dependence on it. In the course of the argument, I thus resist the idea that the aesthetic experience of art is necessarily prior to the aesthetic experience of nature. The perceptual account put forward is based on a realist account of aesthetic properties that considers aesthetic properties to be perceptual properties and that considers aesthetic experience to be perceptually rich. I link it to the idea of ‘whole formalism’, a perceptual, aesthetic account that is nestled in the wider thought that aesthetic perception relates, although not causally, to other features of experience, such as emotion, and knowledge. Perceptual, aesthetic experience is thus not reduced to an austere account of aesthetic formalism. The thesis begins by analysing historical accounts of aesthetic perception, beginning with Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas. It builds on this analysis by reinterpreting crucial concepts to the discipline of aesthetics, such as disinterest and formalism that originated in the eighteenth century and are relevant to the idea of aesthetic perception. It then brings the idea of aesthetic perception up to date by addressing the current debate about cognitivism and non-cognitivism about aesthetic experience where nature is concerned. By tracing the idea of aesthetic perception historically, I will have also shown the role of nature as a paradigm of aesthetic experience through history and that nature is a repository for rich aesthetic experience and for rich experiential engagement with it.

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In this thesis I argue that our philosophical account of the nature and norms of belief should both inform and be informed by our scientific understanding of monothematic delusions. In Chapter 1, I examine and criticise standard attempts to answer the question “What is delusion?” In particular, I claim that such attempts are misguided because they misunderstand the kind of term that “delusion” is. In Chapter 2, I look at the nature of explanation in psychology and apply it to delusions. In particular I look at the constraints on a successful explanation of a person’s psychological state in terms of brain damage or dysfunction. I then propose, in Chapter 3, a way of understanding how delusions of misidentification arise. In particular, I criticise the standard view that they are formed via inference (in the relevant sense of “inference”) on the basis of anomalous experience. I draw on empirical work on object and individual tracking, on dreams, and on the Frégoli delusion, and argue that inference is not only un-necessary, but is actually often bypassed in humans, for judgments of identification. The result is a non-inferential file-retrieval view. On certain views of belief, this would mean that the Capgras delusion lacks the right functional role to count as a genuine belief. In Chapter 4, I criticise such views of belief, and put forward a “downstream only” view. Roughly, something is a case of believing if and only if it disposes people to act in certain ways. I defend such a view against two serious and influential objections. In Chapter 5, I ask whether this means that the Capgras delusion can therefore safely be called a belief. I argue that there is a risk – even if one accepts the downstream only view of belief – that it still won’t count as a belief, as a result of the subject’s “incoherence” or “agentive inertia.” However, I then distinguish egocentric from encyclopaedic doxastic states. This opens the possibility that one can truly say that the subject has the egocentric belief, “This man is not my father”, but may fail to have the encyclopaedic belief, “My father has been replaced by an impostor”. It also demonstrates that the question “Are delusions beliefs?” has been approached in an unhelpful way by the main participants in the debate. This thesis is important because it shows the extent to which real-world phenomena can inform and be informed by central philosophical notions like belief. More precisely, it shows that the most plausible way of accounting for monothematic delusions involves abandoning both a strong normativism, and a discrete representationalism, about belief.

published_or_final_version / Environmental Management / Master / Master of Science in Environmental Management

This thesis examines the intersection of culture and the environment in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, through a study and analysis of the Elves of Lothlórien, the Ents of Fangorn, and their respective landscapes.

In the United States, the foundational myths of Nature are wilderness and pastoral arcadia. This dissertation examines a different kind of nature that emerges as habitats in urban wastelands and margins. This cosmopolitan community is a hybrid nature that is the unintended product of human activity and nature's unflagging opportunism, which I call marginal nature. Marginal nature is neither pristine nor pastoral, but rather a nature whose ecological and cultural significance requires a reassessment of our narratives of nature. The wastelands are unique sounding boards for measuring perceptions of nature, since these places provoke ambiguous responses of attraction and repulsion. I explore perceptions of wasteland habitat from the perspectives of urban space, urban ecology, and literature about urban nature. The primary methodology of this dissertation is hermeneutical inquiry which reveals the layers of environmental discourse concealing marginal nature beneath language that asks it to be something that it is not. This environmental hermeneutics focuses on key issues of the geography of nature: nonhuman agency, place, and nature/society hybrids. I argue that comprehending the lifeworld of the wastelands requires a reassessment of the concept of place as a coproduction of humans and nonhumans, that is, an ecology of place. / text

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This dissertation examines the production and consumption of nature in middle-class American holidays. Focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it follows the creation of new symbols and practices associated with Easter, the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving and Christmas. In each of these holidays, members of the middle class used nature to narrate their new identity as Americans belonging less to local, regional, or ethnic communities and more to the nuclear family and the nation. In Thanksgiving, the turkey became an important symbol in the antebellum era, the same period in which the Easter rabbit was born, the Fourth of July picnic became popular, and the Christmas tree rose to prominence. These trends resulted from the middle-class desire to make the home an idealized private life complete with its own rituals and symbols that separated it from the public life of the street. While the middle class retreated into its imagined private sphere, it did so while simultaneously claiming that their families represented the core building blocks of the nation. By conflating family and nation, the middle class generated a large demand for the physical goods that made such symbolic meaning manifest--in particular, Thanksgiving turkeys and Christmas trees. Reproducing these plants and animals, however, created agroecological problems, including crop diseases. While middle-class family holidays reinforce the scales of popular culture and mass agriculture, they do so only tenuously.

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