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A research investigation that illustrates the development of the European landscape tradition as an unbroken interactive and material movement, through discussion of artists from Annibale Carracci (1560-1609) to Richard Long (1945 –). The contribution of each artist within their respective epoch will be used to propose that the subject of landscape has become an actual creative medium, integral to and consistent with the external Plein-Air technique. Thus, presenting a ‘creative narrative’ from the observed into the articulated that will demonstrate how the examination and representation of actual landscapes have become physically used within creative presentations. The study uses key artworks that have been inspired by landscape to show the shift from documentation into interaction with the reality of the natural world. This entails the chronology of the investigation and commences with the concept of Ideal Landscape, established by Carracci, within the late 16th century, through the development of the Plein-Air tradition and culminating with particular emphasis on European landscape artists’ and movements since 1945 that have interacted with actual sites and natural materials: from the ideal to the actual. Furthermore, the European transfer and diffusion of interactive and material based landscape methods, including drawing and painting outside, the collection of organic items and photography, passed and developed from one generation to the next, informs a body of personal creative work. This is a 50/50 co-dependent strand used to illustrate the practical and creative discourses between practitioner and landscape, involving the articulation of actual land materials, found objects and Plein-Air excursions to the drawing locations of previous practitioners’, sketchbooks and journals. The insights provided, by the personal practice and associated theoretical position, aid the evaluation, analysis and description of the evolution of the creative methods inherent in the development of subject into media, but not presently described in historical accounts, therefore, presenting a Material Chronology and thus the original contribution of knowledge for this investigation.

Using a hybrid of poetry, creative prose, and critical prose, this thesis demonstrates a way in which we can rethink the natural world. Through a series of analyses and original verse and prose, using a reading premise derived from Zen Buddhist philosophy, it presents a vision of animal life and the natural world as philosophically nuanced and psychologically complex. It attempts to reposition the philosophical dominance over the natural world that humans have often considered their monopoly. All the poetry of the thesis engages and illustrates the main critical points outlined here. After an introduction setting out the basic aims and concepts of the thesis, the opening essay quotes David Attenborough. The philosophy espoused in his text, evolutionary theory, cannot be sustained if an animal s psychology is given greater importance. Secondly, from The Life of Birds, I present a critique that suggests that a bird s psychology is complicated to the point of mysticism. The third essay looks at Nietzsche. This piece suggests that what blinds us to the complexity of an animal s world is human ego. Next I look at Marc Bekoff, suggesting that the ego s dominant response is to anthropomorphise animals. The next essay gives a brief reading of Hamlet as a character liberated by a philosophy derived from the sparrow s world. Then follows a series of analyses of poems about non-human animals. A reading of an Emily Dickinson poem shows a narrator trapped in the world of a threatened and unstable ego. Next the poet Ted Hughes and his encounter with a hawk are shown as distanced by the human ego s inability to step outside binary oppositions. Then follows a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, where I argue that he draws on the notion of externality, an ego construct. The next poet, Takahashi, writes ego into his poem. His poem fails to speak without it. Finally, I look at D.H. Lawrence. Here the inability of ego to relinquish itself from dominating its encounter with the natural world is critiqued. The discursive parts of the thesis are interwoven with examples of my own creative practice that attempt to put into effect the ideas I am elaborating. In the conclusion, I offer proposals for further thought. Keywords creative writing, poetry, creative-critical, hybrid, psychology, animals, nature, natural world, Zen Buddhism, philosophy.

My thesis work is about flow. Indeterminate lines symbolize the developing plant form and explore the perception of space by experimenting with the subject's proportion and shape. Movement is also a vital factor of space, a notion found in the early forms of cursive script (grass script) of Far Eastern calligraphy. My individual plant pieces work as dots and lines of cursive script. An installation's ceramic pieces illustrate similar flow and movement when viewed as a whole.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:32:25Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2007-05-17Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T19:22:03Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 mahl_ml_dr_assis.pdf: 4379518 bytes, checksum: a3e759e5117928a54dc22b77dc02db21 (MD5) / Ao longo do século XIX, ganhou projeção o processo de desbravamento do território paulista, impulsionado, principalmente, pelo surto cafeeiro. Regiões até então pouco exploradas, acabaram atraindo imensas levas populacionais, que buscavam perspectivas de enriquecimento e trabalho em novas terras, iniciando uma série de mudanças no mundo natural que, até então, havia se mantido relativamente intocado em grande parte do Estado. Dentre as várias regiões transformadas em zonas pioneiras, durante essa expansão econômica, merece destaque o Noroeste paulista, onde a cidade de São José do Rio Preto tornou-se, entre as décadas de 1910 e 1940, sede de uma das zonas de maior crescimento do Estado de São Paulo. Nesse movimento de conquista do interior de São Paulo, entre o final do século XIX e a primeira metade do século XX, percebe-se, por meio da análise de jornais e revistas que circulavam comumente nos maiores centros urbanos, a formação de uma contundente crítica ambiental, que começava a tentar compreender quais foram os efeitos dessa expansão econômica ao meio ambiente paulista. Esses discursos, mesmo partindo de realidades tão distintas - capital e interior - mostram uma grande similaridade, ao apresentarem fundamentalmente dois eixos centrais de discussão. De um lado, a valorização do progresso e da expansão econômica, que entendia a destruição do mundo natural como uma conseqüência necessária para o desenvolvimento, além de um símbolo de vitória do homem sobre o meio ambiente. De outro, discursos que criticavam os impactos ambientais desencadeados pela conquista do interior, além de defenderem a necessidade do surgimento de novas formas de interação, menos violentas e mais harmoniosas, entre a sociedade e a natureza. O presente trabalho analisa a origem e as tensões existentes entre essas duas concepções de ecologia, que emergiram naquele momento de crescimento da economia paulista. / All over the nineteenth century, the process of cleaning land in Paulista territory, stimulated especially by the sudden appearance of the coffee production, gained ground. Regions that were little exploited started to attract huge masses of the population that looked for enrichment and work in new lands. In consequence, a series of changes in the natural world, which had been relatively untouchable up to that moment, began in great part of the State. São José do Rio Preto was one among the various regions which were transformed into pioneering growing zones during the economic expansion, from the 1910s to the 1940s. With this movement of conquest in the interior of São Paulo, it was possible to observe, through the analysis of commonly circulated newspapers and magazines of the time, the formation of a consistent environmental criticism. Critics, then, started to understand the effects of such economic expansion on Paulista environment. Their discourses, even from distinct realities (from the capital city and from the interior) show a great similarity when they present two-center-lines of discussion: on the one hand, the appreciation of the progress and the economic expansion leading to the destruction of the natural world as a necessary development of the areas as well as the victory of the human being over the environment; on the other hand, the discourses that criticized the environmental impacts as a result of the conquest of the interior of the state, besides defending the necessity of the appearance of a less violent and more harmonious form of interaction between society and nature. The present work analyses the origin and tensions between these two conceptions of ecology that emerged in that moment of Paulista economic growing.

Jacques Joseph Scientific Realism and the Natural World M.A. thesis Abstract The main topic of this work is the relation between the natural world and the world of the natural sciences, and furthermore the relation of both these worlds to our conception of an external reality "as it really is". The core of the work is rooted mainly in the Anglo-American analytical philosophy of science, namely the debate concerning scientific realism, with a section dedicated to Husserl's conception of the relation between the natural world and natural sciences (as described in his Krisis). The goal of this work is to show scientific realism as broken beyond repair, and to then offer an alternative. The problems that plague realism run deep into its roots, many of which it shares with its opponents, the new alternative theory therefore needs to be completely different. This work suggests the "Natural ontological attitude" (NOA) presented by Arthur Fine, a theory that tries to salvage the intuitions that made realism seem so attractive. NOA is then developped, using texts by W. V. O. Quine and D. Davidson, as a minimalistic metaphysics based strongly on language that still manages to provide a relation to an extra-linguistic reality.

Orientador: Antonio Celso Ferreira / Banca: Silvia Fernanda de Mendonça Figueirôa / Banca: Jozimar Paes de Almeida / Banca: Tania R. De Luca / Banca: Flávia Arlanch Martins de Oliveira / Resumo: Ao longo do século XIX, ganhou projeção o processo de desbravamento do território paulista, impulsionado, principalmente, pelo surto cafeeiro. Regiões até então pouco exploradas, acabaram atraindo imensas levas populacionais, que buscavam perspectivas de enriquecimento e trabalho em novas terras, iniciando uma série de mudanças no mundo natural que, até então, havia se mantido relativamente intocado em grande parte do Estado. Dentre as várias regiões transformadas em zonas pioneiras, durante essa expansão econômica, merece destaque o Noroeste paulista, onde a cidade de São José do Rio Preto tornou-se, entre as décadas de 1910 e 1940, sede de uma das zonas de maior crescimento do Estado de São Paulo. Nesse movimento de conquista do interior de São Paulo, entre o final do século XIX e a primeira metade do século XX, percebe-se, por meio da análise de jornais e revistas que circulavam comumente nos maiores centros urbanos, a formação de uma contundente crítica ambiental, que começava a tentar compreender quais foram os efeitos dessa expansão econômica ao meio ambiente paulista. Esses discursos, mesmo partindo de realidades tão distintas - capital e interior - mostram uma grande similaridade, ao apresentarem fundamentalmente dois eixos centrais de discussão. De um lado, a valorização do progresso e da expansão econômica, que entendia a destruição do mundo natural como uma conseqüência necessária para o desenvolvimento, além de um símbolo de vitória do homem sobre o meio ambiente. De outro, discursos que criticavam os impactos ambientais desencadeados pela conquista do interior, além de defenderem a necessidade do surgimento de novas formas de interação, menos violentas e mais harmoniosas, entre a sociedade e a natureza. O presente trabalho analisa a origem e as tensões existentes entre essas duas concepções de ecologia, que emergiram naquele momento de crescimento da economia paulista. / Abstract: All over the nineteenth century, the process of cleaning land in Paulista territory, stimulated especially by the sudden appearance of the coffee production, gained ground. Regions that were little exploited started to attract huge masses of the population that looked for enrichment and work in new lands. In consequence, a series of changes in the natural world, which had been relatively untouchable up to that moment, began in great part of the State. São José do Rio Preto was one among the various regions which were transformed into pioneering growing zones during the economic expansion, from the 1910s to the 1940s. With this movement of conquest in the interior of São Paulo, it was possible to observe, through the analysis of commonly circulated newspapers and magazines of the time, the formation of a consistent environmental criticism. Critics, then, started to understand the effects of such economic expansion on Paulista environment. Their discourses, even from distinct realities (from the capital city and from the interior) show a great similarity when they present two-center-lines of discussion: on the one hand, the appreciation of the progress and the economic expansion leading to the destruction of the natural world as a necessary development of the areas as well as the victory of the human being over the environment; on the other hand, the discourses that criticized the environmental impacts as a result of the conquest of the interior of the state, besides defending the necessity of the appearance of a less violent and more harmonious form of interaction between society and nature. The present work analyses the origin and tensions between these two conceptions of ecology that emerged in that moment of Paulista economic growing. / Doutor

The issue of ecological ethics has often been discussed because it is important for the development of further generations. Nature and culture are not at the same level, yet culture is subordinate to nature. Because of human influence, the harmony of nature is endangered and we live in an ecological crisis. This master's thesis compares the opinions of experts in Czech environment who perceive the ecological ethics, collisions of nature and culture and environmental sphere from the point of philosophy. In the first part, there is a theoretical basis of ecological ethics and the elementary classification. Further, the development of ecological ethics in the Czech phylosophical thinking is presented. In the main part, the author always explores two selected ideas of Czech professionals - Erazim Kohák, Josef Šmajs, Hana Librová, Petr Jemelka and Jan Patočka. The conclusion of the thesis is that although all the authors come from various conceptions, their results are more or less corresponding. It is fundamental to accept a personal responsibility and not to long for power and profit. It is imporant to indicate and become aware of ecological crisis and start to solve it on our own at first (e. g. by voluntary modesty and awareness that we leave a legacy for further generations). We do not need to live...

<p>The subject-matter of this essay is the moral status of nature. This subject is dealt with in terms of normative reasons. The main question is if there are direct normative reasons to care for nature in addition to the numerous indirect normative reasons that there are for doing so. Roughly, if there is some such reason, and that reason applies to any moral agent, then nature has direct moral status as I use the phrase. I develop the notions of direct normative reason and direct moral status in detail and identify and discuss the two main types of theory according to which nature has direct moral status: analogy-based nature-considerism (AN) and non-analogy-based nature-considerism (NN). I argue for the plausibility of a particular version of the latter, but against the plausibility of any version of the former.</p><p>The theory that is representative of AN claims that nature has direct moral status in virtue of possessing interests. Proponents of this theory fail to show (i) that nature has interests of the kind that they reasonably want to ascribe to it, and (ii) that interests of this kind are morally significant. In contrast to AN, NN comes in a variety of different forms. I elaborate a version of NN according to which there are direct normative reasons to care for nature in virtue of (i) its unique complexity, and (ii) its indispensability (to all moral agents). I argue that even if these reasons should turn out not to apply to any moral agent, they are still genuine direct normative reasons: there is nothing irrational or misdirected about them.</p><p>Finally, I show how the question of whether there are direct normative reasons to care for nature is relevant to private and political decision-making concerning nature. This is exemplified with a case from the Swedish mountain region.</p>

The subject-matter of this essay is the moral status of nature. This subject is dealt with in terms of normative reasons. The main question is if there are direct normative reasons to care for nature in addition to the numerous indirect normative reasons that there are for doing so. Roughly, if there is some such reason, and that reason applies to any moral agent, then nature has direct moral status as I use the phrase. I develop the notions of direct normative reason and direct moral status in detail and identify and discuss the two main types of theory according to which nature has direct moral status: analogy-based nature-considerism (AN) and non-analogy-based nature-considerism (NN). I argue for the plausibility of a particular version of the latter, but against the plausibility of any version of the former. The theory that is representative of AN claims that nature has direct moral status in virtue of possessing interests. Proponents of this theory fail to show (i) that nature has interests of the kind that they reasonably want to ascribe to it, and (ii) that interests of this kind are morally significant. In contrast to AN, NN comes in a variety of different forms. I elaborate a version of NN according to which there are direct normative reasons to care for nature in virtue of (i) its unique complexity, and (ii) its indispensability (to all moral agents). I argue that even if these reasons should turn out not to apply to any moral agent, they are still genuine direct normative reasons: there is nothing irrational or misdirected about them. Finally, I show how the question of whether there are direct normative reasons to care for nature is relevant to private and political decision-making concerning nature. This is exemplified with a case from the Swedish mountain region.