Leisure typically has been regarded as a positive component in people's lives, and evidence points to its central rather than peripheral role in lifestyle. Further, studies of leisure suggest it is conducive to psychological well-being, to physical health, and to the stability of social groups. The extent to which people are able to reach this potential very much depends on leisure's role in lifestyle, the experience of leisure, and whether conditions in a consumption-oriented society facilitate such positive outcomes. For many, leisure in consumption-oriented lifestyles holds symbolic meaning. Important aspects of personal identity and meaning are found in leisure-related possessions and through leisure activities pursued. For others, leisure represents an internal, inner-directed process through which activities or behaviours are intrinsically motivated, freely chosen, and ultimately satisfying. In this study, lifestyle was conceptualized and operationalized using a 'voluntary simplicity' value orientation, focussing on four main value dimensions: (1) material simplicity, (2) self-determination, (3) ecological awareness, and (4) personal growth. The purpose of the study was to examine the role that lifestyle plays in the relationship between leisure and psychological well-being. A self-administered questionnaire was completed by adults enrolled in general interest and continuing education leisure courses. Five basic concepts were assessed in the questionnaire: (1) leisure participation, (2) importance of leisure activity to lifestyle, (3) leisure experience, (4) psychological well-being, and (5) lifestyle. The highest frequencies of leisure participation per month included reading books, magazines and newspapers, listening to music, and watching television and videos. Leisure experience was characterized by higher challenge and awareness, and lower boredom and anxiety. There was general support for voluntary simplicity values in lifestyle with personal growth, self-determination, and ecological awareness dimensions being higher and material simplicity values being the lowest. Lifestyles that more strongly embraced voluntary simplicity were associated with higher levels of challenge and awareness, and lower levels of anxiety and boredom in the experience of leisure. The self-determination, ecological awareness, and personal growth dimensions of a voluntary simplicity lifestyle contributed to heightened positive affect within psychological well-being, while lower levels of material simplicity increased negative affect (decreased psychological well-being). When all factors are taken together, a significant proportion of variance in psychological well-being is explained by the <I><b>experience</b></I> of leisure, especially <I><b>high challenge</b></I>, and <b><I>not</b></I> by <I><b>leisure participation</b></I>, and by a <I><b>voluntary simplicity lifestyle</b></I> characterized by self-determination, ecological awareness and personal growth values in the <I><b>positive affect</b></I> dimension, and material simplicity values in the <I><b>negative affect</b></I> dimension of psychological well-being. These results suggest that regardless of the type and intensity of leisure involvement, if through heightened awareness, higher challenge and lower anxiety are sought in leisure, especially as expressed within a voluntary simplicity lifestyle, then higher levels of psychological well-being may be achieved. Indeed, by reducing lifestyle complexity and lessening the focus on consumerism, the inherent value of leisure to well-being might well emerge to a greater degree.

Seeing beauty in the simplest aspects of nature inspires me to create art as a testament to our world. Being raised on a farm in rural Virginia gave me an appreciation of a reverence for all life. The inherent forms along with color and value establish nature as the master of aesthetics. An early introduction to Japanese art showed me that all nature was worthy and significant as subjects for art. Using materials derived from nature, cotton, linen, wool, silk, adds a tactile quality that I believe elevates the enjoyment of art.

The following is a collection of lines, curves, and dots on a plane, representing words fashioned to communicate my ideas about relationships between the thing and the nothing. This thesis is like a map, a contour drawing, an assortment of lines, speaking my thoughts about things in relation to space and time. As something moving, developing into another thing, as a thing sentient, I am viewing, performing, and processing incremental acts. I am looking at water and I can see my reflection break into a thousand pieces. It is like watching time.

Starting point. Voluntary simplicity is a form of lifestyle. Its typical feature is selection intensity in all areas of human life. Severity of voluntary simplicity lies in self-control of consumer behavior in the daily confrontation with the media pressure, which is oriented at a high rate of consumption. The task of this thesis was to find out if people raised in voluntarily simple families keep living this way, or if they turned away from this lifestyle and joined the high consumption society. Methods and results. Research included 40 respondents who met the requirement that voluntary simplicity was part of their upbringing. Addressed were people from alternatively living groups (preppers, ecovillages, macrobiotics, minimalists, forums dedicated to maternal education and child care, and other groups possessing forums on an alternative way of life of voluntary simplicity). The investigation was conducted by a questionnaire which was distributed electronically among respondents. We found that 13 out of 40 respondents (32,5 %) fully met our stated profile of voluntary simplicity. Relative frequency of responses from all respondents that meet the requirements of modest behavior amounted to 74,3 %. Hypothesis H1 predicted that the influence of upbringing in a voluntary simplicity will make respondents prefer...

As transformações culturais dos anos 1960 marcaram definitivamente a arquitetura ocidental. A disciplina passa a incorporar diversas experiências que questionam seu campo de atuação, sua dimensão crítica e sua função social. Trata-se de um momento de inflexão em relação aos postulados que conduziram o Movimento Moderno na primeira metade do século 20. O objetivo desta tese é contribuir para a compreensão das práticas disciplinares não hegemônicas verificadas na arquitetura desenvolvida a partir dos anos 1960. Parte-se da hipótese de que a dimensão crítica de alguns projetos desenvolvidos nesse período revela estratégias projetuais e conceituais que poderiam ser consideradas alternativas ao pensamento do período pós-crítico, que marcou a arquitetura produzida nas últimas décadas do século 20. Como estudos de casos, foram selecionados os projetos \"The Thirteen Watchtowers of Cannaregio\" e \"House for the In habitant Who Refused to Participate\", ideados como um par entre os anos 1974 e 1979 pelo arquiteto americano John Hejduk na cidade de Veneza, na Itália. Esses projetos apresentam estratégias arquitetônicas e urbanas que se desviam do que pode ser entendido como \"pós-modernidade clássica\" e revelam metodologias de projeto que precedem grande parte do repertório projetual da arquitetura contemporânea. A partir do diálogo com discursos teóricos recentes, três conceitoschave serão utilizados como estrutura para a análise: geografia, identidade e simplicidade. / The cultural transformations of the 1960s have permanently affected Western architecture. The discipline incorporated a series of experiences, which have challenged its field of action, critical dimension and social function. They configured a moment of inflexion in relation to the postulates that conducted the Modern Movement during the first half of the 20th century. The aim of this research is to contribute to the expansion of our understanding of non-hegemonic disciplinary practices in architecture since the 1960s. The hypothesis is that the critical dimension of some projects that followed this period reveal design strategies and concepts that could be considered alternative to post-critical thinking, a predominant framework attributed to the architectural production of the last decades of the 20th century. The projects \"The Thirteen Watchtowers of Cannaregio\" and \"House for the Inhabitant Who Refused to Participate\" designed by the American architect John Hejduk between 1974 and 1979 for the City of Venice are proposed as case studies. These projects present design strategies at architectural and urban scales that deviate from what could be understood as \"classical postmodernity\". They reveal methodologies that widely anticipate the repertoire of contemporary design practices. Recent theoretical discourses are engaged with three key concepts that compose an analytical framework: geography, identity and simplicity.

In this essay I examine the plausibility of theism and naturalism. I will do this by applying the principle of simplicity as a criterion for measuring the probability of these two worldviews. Theism is the view that God exist as a transcendent being and that the ultimate reality is personal. Naturalism on the other side opposes theism and postulate that only the natural world exist and that the ultimate reality is impersonal. The principle of simplicity measures which of competing theories is simpler and one aspect of simplicity is that if a theory F is simpler than a competing theory H, then F postulates none or fewer ad hoc hypotheses than H. Another aspect of simplicity is that if H means postulating an explanation that goes beyond necessity and F does not, then F is simpler than H.    It is easy to think that theism, because it postulate a supernatural being, is more complex than naturalism. It is tempting to make the fast conclusion that theism is more ad hoc than naturalism, and because we can understand nature by using the naturalistic method that assumes that God does not intervene in nature, has the conclusion that theism is unnecessary. One of the reasons for making the above conclusion is because theism does not correspond well with background knowledge i.e. facts we know by experience to be true. Some philosophers assumes that we can use background knowledge to measure whether F is simpler than H. They assume that simpler metaphysical theories are those with more background assumptions into the body of the metaphysical theory. A crucial task in this essay will be to evaluate that assumption.   I propose that it is problematic to apply background knowledge when assessing the simplicity of metaphysical theories because assuming that one can measure metaphysical simplicity with background knowledge is to assume that all that exist is relatively symmetrical. Also, I suggest that naturalism is more ad hoc than theism when it comes to explain diverse phenomena in the world.

This study traces the first steps of how divine simplicity entered into Christian Trinitarian discourse. It is the burden of this thesis to demonstrate that divine simplicity emerged in the ante-Nicene period with a distinctive status quaestionis concerning (a) the meaning of the doctrine, and (b) its function in reflections on the Father-Son relation. The first part argues that simplicity emerged in the ante-Nicene period with two possible trajectories of interpretation, anticipated by Plato’s Republic and Phaedo respectively. In the apologists, divine simplicity emerged as a purely metaphysical doctrine. However, a richer interpretation of the doctrine is also available in ante-Nicene theology, as exemplified in Origen’s understanding of divine simplicity as a metaphysical-ethical synthesis, meaning that (a) God’s nature is perfectly incorruptible, and (b) God’s character is perfectly free from contradictions. The second part argues that divine simplicity acquired a role in ante-Nicene reflections on the Father-Son relation within two significant ante-Nicene contexts: (a) polemic against Valentinian emanation (prolatio/probolē) and (b) polemic against Monarchianism. The genius of Origen is to utilise divine simplicity for avoiding the Monarchian identification between the Father and Son on the one hand, and the Valentinian separation between the Father and Son on the other. Consequently, we find the surprising conclusion that divine simplicity serves as a principle of differentiation as well as unity between the Father and Son. This thesis raises new questions for both modern theologians and patristic specialists. For modern theologians, the ante-Nicene developments suggest the Son’s generation as a fruitful site for further analysis on the relation between divine simplicity and Trinitarian theology. For patristic specialists, ante-Nicene developments highlight the need to account for the transition from the ante-Nicene to the post-Nicene status quaestionis: how did divine simplicity change from being attributed to the Father (ante-Nicene) to being attributed to the divine essence (post-Nicene)?

Languages are culturally transmitted through a repeated cycle of learning and communicative interaction. These two aspects of cultural transmission impose (at least) three interacting pressures that can shape the evolution of linguistic structure: a pressure for learnability, a pressure for expressivity, and a pressure for coordination amongst users in a linguistic community. This thesis considers how these sometimes competing pressures impact linguistic complexity across cultural time. Using artificial language and iterated learning experimental paradigms, I investigate the conditions under which complexity in morphological and syntactic systems emerges, spreads, and reduces. These experiments illustrate the interaction of transmission, learning and use in hitherto understudied domains - morphosyntax and word order. In a first study (Chapter 2), I report the first iterated learning experiments to investigate the evolution of complexity in compositional structure at the word and sentence level. I demonstrate that a complex meaning space paired with pressures for learnability and communication can result in compositional hierarchical constituent structure, including fixed combinatorial rules of word formation and word order. This structure grants a productive and productively interpretable language and only requires learners to acquire a finite lexicon and a finite set of combinatorial rules (i.e., a grammar). In Chapter 3, I address the unique effect of communicative interaction on linguistic complexity, by removing language learning completely. Speakers use their native language to express novel meanings either in isolation or during communicative interaction. I demonstrate that even in this case, communicative interaction leads to more efficient and overall simpler linguistic systems. These first two studies provide support for the claim that morphological and syntactic complexity are shaped by an overarching drive towards simplicity (or learnability) in language learning and communication. Chapter 4 reports a series of experiments assessing the possibility that the simplicity bias found in the first two studies operates at a different strength depending on the linguistic level. Studies in natural language learning and in pidgin/creole genesis suggest that while morphological variation seems to be highly susceptible to regularisation, variation in other syntactic features, like word order, appears more likely to be reproduced. I test this experimentally by comparing regularisation of unconditioned variation across morphology and word order in the context of artificial language learning. I show that language users in fact regularise unconditioned variation in a similar way across linguistic levels, suggesting that the simplicity bias may be driven by a single, non-level-specific mechanism. Taken together, the experimental evidence presented in this thesis supports the hypothesis that the cultural and cognitive pressures acting on language users during learning and communicative interaction - for learnability, expressivity and coordination - are at least partially responsible for the evolution of linguistic complexity. Specifically, they are responsible for the emergence of linguistic complexity which maximises learnability and communicative efficiency, and for the reduction of complexity which does not. More generally, the approach taken in this thesis promotes a view of complexity in linguistic systems as an evolving variable determined by the biases of language learners and users as languages are culturally transmitted.

This thesis supports the Master of Fine Arts exhibition, To End In Silence, at the Slocumb Galleries, East Tennessee State University, March 15-19, 2010. The exhibit consists of fourteen pieces, which are either presented on pedestals or mounted on the wall. To comment on the title of my thesis, it is a description of the state of calm that I strive to embrace during the creation of my work and the unobtrusive yet engaging tone that I hope for each finished composition to project. This paper explores the aesthetic and conceptual transitions in my work, inspired by a period of personal realization and acceptance. Influences discussed include a number of connections to historical practices including Buddhism, Numerology, and Traditional Japanese Aesthetics, as well as the works of contemporary artists, Agnes Martin, Lee Bontecou, and Manfred Muller. Also included is a complete catalogue of works from To End In Silence.

This study investigates how minimalist narrative techniques in American modernist literature oblige us, as readers and critics, to be self-reflexive about the ethical basis of interpretation. Through a concentrated narratological analysis of Hemingway’s and Cather’s fiction, I identify three major elements of what I term the “simple text”—thinness, smoothness, and spaciousness—and I show how each category engages a hermeneutic ethics. By gesturing towards accessibility and straightforward comprehension while also producing moments of indeterminacy that subtly resist the reader’s inferences, the simple text challenges the reader to conceive interpretation both as a positive exercise of individuation and imagination and, simultaneously, as a potentially unethical mode of critical violation and imposition. My introduction contemplates the ethical foundations of Hemingway’s and Cather’s famous aesthetics of omission to argue that such simplicity conveys a complex theory of reader engagement. Chapter One defines “thinness” by examining “thin characters” in A Farewell to Arms and My Ántonia—characters whose simplicity makes them paradoxically unreadable in a way that foregrounds the nature of our accountability towards others. The second chapter, focusing on In Our Time and Death Comes for the Archbishop, defines “smoothness” as a simple paratactic patterning that challenges our critical desire to generalize meanings from particular experiences. While the smooth surface invites our interpretive touch, its structural integrity resists marking and inscription. The final chapter details the element of “spaciousness,” showing how open and simple settings in The Old Man and the Sea and The Professor’s House inspire, in the protagonists, moments of self-conscious interpretation of the nonhuman other and solicit a practice of accountable freedom. I argue that the foregrounding of such spaces proffers a subtle yet pointed critique of American individualism, but this critique is learned only through our encounter with the text’s interpretive limits. The study concludes by suggesting how these strategies both respond to and participate in specific criticisms of American democracy that circulated during the modernist period.