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My thesis is one artist's response to the question of the relevance of landscape painting today, focusing on the communication of the idea of environmental stewardship. The process of studying nature and transferring that vision to canvas promotes greater understanding of the beauty and complexity of elements that comprise ecosystems. The artist possesses a creative impulse finding satisfaction in making artwork that expresses a love of nature as part of a larger worldview. If done well, the persuasive power of such art may be enormous. Comprised of oil paintings and written work, this thesis establishes a way of approaching both landscape painting and the natural environment. Literature pertaining to the contributions of landscape artist Frederic Church, varying aesthetic theories, nature writings, and selected contemporary artists are discussed. The focus then turns to particular landscape elements, introducing the artwork created for the thesis. The thesis concludes with the artist's purpose statement.

Why and, if so, how should educators cultivate hope in hopeless times? I defend a novel interpretation of Immanuel Kant’s theory of moral education - specifically, what I call his “pedagogy of hope,” a pedagogical method Kant prescribes to moral educators in the ‘Doctrine of Method’ of the Critique of Practical Reason for the purpose of cultivating virtuous character. According to Kant, moral educators should cultivate students’ hope for moral progress in order to sustain their moral motivation in the face of uncertainty, failures, and suffering. Kant’s two-step pedagogical method amounts to an aesthetic education, in the sense that it mirrors his account of the relationship between feeling and judgment in experiences of the beautiful and the sublime. Drawing on that account, I describe how, for Kant, moral educators can cultivate hope by developing students’ judgment through deliberation of examples of moral conduct and of moral exemplars.

This body of work explores the emotional aspects of my life through the metaphor of landscape. It is a contemplation of the genre of landscape in the contemporary art dialog. By exploring the materiality of paint and the physicality of working large I discovered the question of contemporary relevancy is no longer my primary reason for this investigation. My growth as an artist has come from exploring historical and contemporary influences and how they have affected my processes and visual aesthetic. Thus, a large series of work has emerged from an unexplainable desire to connect and share the crucial moments of my life through paint.

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<p>The categories of the Sublime and the Beautiful, popularized during the eighteenth century, are central to Wordswordth's major poem The Prelude. In this poem, phrases which pair off fear or terror and love obviously recall Burke's theory of the Sublime as having to do with ideas of self-preservation and the beautiful with ideas of love and society. In book 1 of The Prelude Wrdsworth interprets his formative experiences in terms of solitude and society. experiences of fear and friendship. This interpretation governs the entire poem, though in the final books Wordsworth deprecates his tendency to respond excessively to the sublime. Other ideas of the sublime than Burke's also affected his powerfully. The theme of the mind's steady acquisition of power through The Prelude; it is stated at the conclusion of book VII and in the "Climbing of snowdom" episode of book XIII. This there is a modification of the 17th and 18th century, which examines the mind's attributes to the mind's activities when it confronts grand and wast forms, and attributes to the mind capacities of expansion and elevation. In this own essay, "The Sublime and the Beautiful", belonging to the same period as his Guide to the Lakes, Wordsworth elaborated this idea, claiming that the mind is likely to respond in terms of either awe or elevation when it confronts forms combining "individuality of form" with "duration" and "power". In The Prelude significant experience, involving the arousal and excersie of imagination, generally arises from some combination of simplicity, duration and power in phenomena. Wordsworth's interest in the sublime and beautiful developed through conventional, sensationalist response to the mountaous Lake district environment of his boyhood, and to the alpine regon he visited in 1790. But gradually he evolved a series of laws, stated in "The Sublime and the Beautiful" and implied in The Prelude, which accounted for the imaginative significance of sublime phenomena in terms of their ability to suggest unity, infinity and power. These qualities, once precieved, provided emblems of the imagination, explores its powers, and links it with sublimity. At the end of the poem, however, Wordsworth attaches equal importance to love and beauty. After the crisis of the French Revolution his sister Dorthy, Marry Hutchinson and Coleridge helped to restore his faith in man and nature by directing his attention to the beautiful. The Prelude therefore suggests that the beautiful is fundamentally important in promoting moral and spiritual health. But the poem's major theme is the growth of a poet's mind and imagination, and it is the sublime that is consistently yoked with imaginative vitality.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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Que signifie voir ? et en quoi l’étude d’une œuvre artistique favoriserait-elle l’examen philosophique d’une telle question ? Centré sur le problème de la vision dans l'œuvre d'Alberto Giacometti, ce travail entend mettre au jour une certaine exemplarité de l’artiste dans l’élaboration philosophique de la question de la vision, en posant les conditions d’un dialogue entre art et phénoménologie. Car la vision chez Giacometti problématise l'apparition des choses d'une manière qui bouleverse l'évidence de la constitution d'objet et ébranle la subjectivité. Voir, c’est voir apparaître, mais cette apparition n’est pas simple montée au visible d’une forme accédant à quelque stabilité objective : l’artiste nous force à penser ce que nous proposons d’appeler une « désapparition » de l’objet. L’art se donne en effet comme une forme d’inquiétude du regard, qui balance l’objet entre apparition et disparition, le retire étrangement au toucher et émeut remarquablement le sujet en lui suggérant une dimension sublime de la visibilité qui le renvoie finalement à sa propre mortalité. Sur tous ces points, la phénoménologie peut éclairer l'œuvre de l'artiste, quoique la "résistance" de cette même œuvre à l'égard des thèses philosophiques s’avère tout aussi éclairante : loin de nous amener à la simple conclusion d'une extériorité de l’art et de la philosophie, cette résistance peut en effet se comprendre comme une invitation à retravailler, d’une façon critique, la phénoménologie elle-même. / What is the meaning of seeing ? And why should an artistic work be of any help in a philosophical inquiry on such a topic ? This research is focused on the problem of vision in Alberto Giacometti’s work and intends to reveal an exemplarity of this opus in the philosophical elaboration of vision, by stating the conditions of a dialogue between Art and Phenomenology. For Giacometti’s vision raises a problem in the mere appearance of things : the obviousness of the objet’s constitution is disrupted and the subjectivity disturbed. To see is to see things appear, but this appearance is no longer the simple coming to visibility of a form attaining some objective stabilization : the artist forces us to think what we suggest to call a « desappearance » of the object. Art is then to be thought as a glaze anxiety that balances the object between appearance and disappearance, withdraws it from our touch, and strangely moves the viewer by suggesting a sublime dimension of visibility that finally brings him back to his own mortality. On all these matters, phenomenology can throw light on the artist’s work, though the « resistance » of this very work against philosophical statements turns out to be quite as enlightning : far from leading us to simply conclude that art and philosophy have nothing to do with one another, this resistance can be seen as an invitation to reconsider, critically, Phenomenology itself.

Cette thèse de doctorat se propose de reprendre l'ensemble de la philosophie pratique de Kant en aval, c'est-à-dire à partir de l'ouvrage chronologiquement tardif dans le corpus kantien, La Religion dans les limites de la simple raison (1793), dont la Première partie assigne à la volonté un défi : le « mal radical ». Le « mal radical » n'est pas le mal absolu ou diabolique, mais il consiste en une inversion (Verkehrtheit) de l'ordre des principes au sein du vouloir, et ne peut être déraciné que par l'entière conversion du cœur. Avec le mal s'ouvre l'antinomie du judaïsme, considéré par le philosophe comme le contre-modèle de la foi par excellence, et du christianisme, criterium unique et anhistorique de la religion, seul à même de résoudre le problème de l'homme nouveau. Si, selon Kant, le judaïsme est nouménalement nul parce qu'incapable de véhiculer le contenu de la religion rationnelle, le philosophe, qui considère l'interdit biblique de l'idolâtrie comme « le commandement le plus sublime du Livre de loi des Juifs », lui reconnaît néanmoins le mérite de mettre l'accent sur le respect. Le christianisme, quant à lui, met l'accent sur l'amour, dont Kant retient la signification pratique, à savoir qu'il est l'état de perfection de l'intention vers lequel nous devons tendre / This doctoral thesis suggests taking back the whole of Kant's practical philosophy downstream, i.e. from the chronologically late work in the Kantian corpus, The Religion within the limits of the simple reason (1793), the first part of which assigns to the will a challenge: “radical evil”. “Radical evil” is neither the absolute nor devilish evil, but it consists of an inversion (Verkehrtheit) of the order of the principles within the will, and can only be eradicated by the utter conversion of the heart. With the evil opens the antinomie of the Judaism which the philosopher considers as the paramount counter-model of the faith, and the Christianity, held to be the one and only unhistorical criterium of the religion the only to solve the problem of the new man. If, according to Kant, the Judaism is noumenally invalid because it is not able to convey the contents of the rational religion, the philosopher, who considers the biblical prohibition of the idolization as “the most sublime command of the Book of law of the Jews”, grants it nevertheless the merit of emphasizing respect. Christianity, as for him, emphasizes love, which, in practical meaning that Kant retains, is the state of perfection of the intention towards which we have to aim