This dissertation defends the need for a renewed conception of nature as seen through the lens of an artist. By exploring how the relationship between art and nature has been conceived by 19th and 20th century European and Japanese philosophers (including Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Nishida, and Watsuji), I offer a way of thinking about artistic expression that recognizes the active, expressive character of artistic media and, more broadly, nature itself. Through an analysis of the embodied foundations of artistic creation, I develop a non-subjectivist account of expression that incorporates the climatic milieu. I maintain that the continuity between the embodied self and its life-world implies that the origin of creativity exceeds the will of the individual. This, in turn, implies that nature and the material on which art draws are expressive. According to this view, nature is not an indifferent realm of "mere" material and chemical processes distinct from the domain of culture and meaning. Rather, it is a creative climate from which the artist draws and to which the artist contributes. In conclusion, I maintain that this view has the potential to inform a more sustainable and ethically sound attitude towards the natural world.

Art History, Visual Arts and Musicology / M.A. (Fine Arts)

<p> At its simplest, product design can be described as the steps taken to actualize a product that best solves an identified customer problem. Though the process of product design is not set-in-stone, designers remain focused exclusively on the in-person experience between customers and products. Such a perspective has allowed designers to create products with exceptional precision, elevating the overall experience for customers. However, provided that the adoption of online shopping continues <i>en masse</i>, exploring how designers can engage product design and online shopping together is timely. </p><p> This study proffered a new model and design perspective for designers to more effectively create products that are likely to be investigated and purchased online. This model is a rubric for measuring the difference, if any, between how a product is intended by designers to be perceived online versus what is perceived by customers online. Through a descriptive, quantitative study, cross-checked by open-ended qualitative interviews, the results from 50 survey participants and 10 interviewees indicated that the dimensions of the model &ndash; familiarity (incongruent form, as described by Noseworthy and Trudel, 2011), understandability (prototypical isolation, as described by Ramachandran &amp; Hirstein, 1999), and reward (multiple anticipations, as described by Eyal, 2014) &ndash; are key indicators of how customers evaluate and favor products online. The results suggest that by integrating an online perception evaluation step into the prototyping stage of development, the emergent design will be improved; in turn, allowing designers to produce a more competitive product for the online marketplace.</p><p>

The aim of this thesis is to give a thorough exposition of Santayana's philosophy of art, with a critical commentary using the methods of analytical aesthetics. The subject of the first chapter is the thesis that beauty is objectified pleasure. It is argued that Santayana's views suggest an insight defensible by analytic techniques. The second chapter is concerned to expend Santayana's insights into the role of the materials of a work of art. Chapters III and IV are a consideration of his views on form and expression, respectively. The subjects reviewed are the classification of forms, the sources of pleasure in form, the nature of form, the nature of expression, tragedy, comedy and the sublime. Chapter V is concerned with Santayana's views on the nature and relation of poetry and religion. An outline of an analytic theory of poetry is offered in criticism. Chapter VI deals with the presuppositions of the aesthetics of the Life of Reason period, and with Santayana's view of the nature of art as emergent from instinctive action. Chapter VII is concerned with his views on the aesthetics of music, architecture, the artistic uses of language, painting and sculpture. Neglected insights are stressed, e.g. his theory of the nature of representation. The eighth chapter sets out Santayana's doctrine of the relation of art and morality. Chapter IX deals with late papers and passages on aesthetics reflecting the philosophy of the Realms of Being. The subjects dealt with are: the spiritual life; alleged similarities of doctrine with Proust; his views on Cubism, caricature, and the Aesthetic movement; the varied meanings of the key predicates in aesthetic discourse; his revised formalistic theory of beauty, and scattered remarks in his final work, ‘Dominations and Powers'. The conclusion is that Santayana has far more to offer analytic aestheticians than is generally considered to be the case.

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Master of Landscape Architecture / Department of Landscape Architecture/Regional and Community Planning / Timothy D. Keane / According to the National Alliance on Mental illness, 18.5% of adults in the U.S. experience mental illness each year. Many recent studies suggest that the natural environment can beneficially impact the mental health of an individual. Research on healing gardens suggests that if an individual with depression has a higher aesthetic preference for a landscape, the individual will see a positive increase in mood and perhaps a decrease in depressive symptoms. An environmental preference study was conducted to understand if an aesthetically preferred landscape has an impact on the mood of an individual. Participants were recruited from two universities and included students and non-students. A total of 120 participants were given the option of online or in-person participation. Prior to viewing landscape images, participants completed the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and the Environmental Preference Questionnaire (EPQ). Before and after viewing each image, the participants indicated their mood using a Visual Analog Scale and their aesthetic preference using a Likert-type Scale. This study showed a positive increase in mood, dependent upon aesthetic preference across all participants, however, an overall lower mood for individuals with higher depressional tendencies.

This dissertation defends an answer to the question: to what extent, if any, are aesthetic values in art objective? I defend what I call Moderate Aesthetic Objectivism, which can be summarised as follows. A work of art has a certain aesthetic value if and only if a human critic, in the circumstances ideal for the aesthetic experience of that work, would experience the work as having that aesthetic value. ‘Experience’ here is meant in a broad sense, encompassing imagination and understanding as well as perception. We should regard such a critic as someone who would detect the aesthetic value rather than make it the case that the work had that value. Experiencing a work as being aesthetically valuable in a certain way involves having an aesthetic experience which is itself valuable. Such an experience will be pleasurable, often in complex ways. Although critics in ideal circumstances for the aesthetic experience of a work detect aesthetic values rather than making it the case that the work has certain aesthetic values, the work only has those values because the resultant aesthetic experiences had by such critics are themselves valuable. The aesthetic values of a work are, however, realised by properties of the work which dispose it to cause such valuable aesthetic experiences for humans in the circumstances ideal for the aesthetic experience of the work. Those properties are what is aesthetically valuable in the work, and they are objective in the sense that their existence and character is independent of whether they are detected or responded to. This account therefore retains elements of both subjectivist and objectivist approaches to aesthetic value. It can, I argue, make sense of our conflicting intuitions about the objectivity or subjectivity of aesthetic values in art.

M.A. (Art History) / In the South African literature of Art there has been no real focus on the arid landscape as such. Yet, as it is typical of the country, it is being increasingly explored and painted. However, a discrepancy exists: although the human experience of the arid landscape has become more apparent in paintings since the Fifties, this phenomenon was not really reflected in the Art Literature. This research was conducted to assess the value of landscapes in South African paintings, especially the arid landscape. In the introduction it is shown that the term "landscape" can be interpreted in two ways. In the first instance, the term "landscape" refers to the visual, geographical features of a specific area. In the second instance, the term "landscape" relates to metaphysical aspects, such as the experiencing, processing, involvement and relationship of man with his environment. A short historical review was done of South African paintings during the periods 1860-1920 and 1920-1950. During these periods the rural existence acted as the norm in landscapes. This norm changed after 1950, reflecting a more abstract tendency in art, which indicated a deepening spiritual expression by man. In chapter two an introductory view is given of the third period 1950-1990, focusing on the interaction of man and the arid landscape as expressed on four levels, namely, the geographical, the social, the psychic and the spiritual. The arid landscape appears geographically prominent as it covers a vast area of the land.

In content, concept, and form, my collection of poems is composed of a number of thematic obsessions. These are: music, sound, and hearing; recording and surveillance; play and participation as described by Hans-Georg Gadamer in Truth & Method; the angel of history as described by Walter Benjamin; situation, inheritance, influence; aggression, antagonism, manipulation, control; fixity and mutability; eros, desire, and sex; conversation, the dialectic relationship of wholes and parts. You might see that all of these themes relate, that they each appear as one another. WAX speaks and performs all of these themes from that point where self and other--and where identity and universality--collapse; that single point of fear, violence, loss, union, obliteration, feeling, responsibility; that single point of possibility where we might discover a revised I, a new answer for "how to write we."

<p> This dissertation examines the aesthetics of the mid-20th century musical avant-garde from an Arendtian perspective. I focus on three musical figures: Glenn Gould, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Helmut Lachenmann. Each of these figures worked through the legacy of musical structuralism by staging various encounters with aspects of musical performance. My reevaluation of these musical figures is oriented by a reading of the contemporaneous political theories of Hannah Arendt, as found in <i>The Human Condition, On Revolution,</i> and <i> Between Past and Future,</i> in particular. In these Cold War era texts, Arendt argues that human cultures are constituted through the exemplary actions of individuals, who risk their lives for the sake of communal principles, thereby imprinting these contestable societal norms upon public consciousness. </p><p> Arendt&rsquo;s account of action, revolution and political judgment have much in common with a broader performative turn that was taking place in avant-garde artistic practices of the same time (c. 1950 &ndash; 1970). This turn resituated the ontology of the musical work from the notated page to the physical acts and technologies of sound production. Of deeper provenance, however, is the fact that Arendt&rsquo;s political theories have an important basis in her appropriation of Kantian aesthetics. I argue that the Kantian inspired elisions of politics and art in her theory justifies re-mapping her political concepts onto art. I refer to these re-mappings as inversions to draw attention to the pivotal role that performance plays in Arendt&rsquo;s theories, operating as a hinge between political and aesthetic categories. I do so also to ground a material history of the encounters with musical formalism that took place in the creative practices of my musical subjects. Thus my title, <i>Action Aesthetics,</i> refers to this attempt to re-infuse Arendt&rsquo;s political theory of exemplary action into the modernist musical legacy of Kantian aesthetics.</p><p>