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Environmental Philosophy and the Ethics of Terraforming Mars: Adding the Voices of Environmental Justice and Ecofeminism to the Ongoing Debate

Description: Questions concerning the ethics of terraforming Mars have received some attention from both philosophers and scientists during recent decades. A variety of theoretical approaches have been supplied by a number of authors, however research pursuant to this thesis has indicated at least two major blindspots in the published literature on the topic. First, a broad category of human considerations involving risks, dangers, and social, political, and economic inequalities that would likely be associ… more
Date: August 2013
Creator: French, Robert Heath
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Partner: UNT Libraries
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Toward a philosophy of water: Politics of the pollution and damming along the Ganges River.

Description: This thesis sets out to develop a beginning of a philosophy of water by considering philosophical implications of ecological crises currently happening along the waters of the Ganges River. In my first chapter, I give a historical account of a philosophy of water. In my second chapter, I describe various natural and cultural representations of the Ganges, accounting for physical features of the river, Hindu myths and rituals involving the river, and ecological crises characterized by the pollut… more
Date: May 2007
Creator: McAnally, Elizabeth Ann
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Strange Matter, Strange Objects: An Ontological Reorientation of the Philosophical Concept of Wonder

Description: Wonder has had a rich and diverse history in the western philosophical tradition. Both Plato and Aristotle claim that philosophy begins in wonder, while Descartes marks it as the first of the passions and Heidegger uses it as a signpost for a new trajectory of philosophy away from idealism and nihilism. Despite such a rich history, wonder is almost always thought to be exhausted by the acquisition of knowledge. That is, wonder is thought of almost exclusively in epistemological terms and is dis… more
Date: May 2016
Creator: Onishi, Brian Hisao
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Partner: UNT Libraries
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Knowing What is Useful: Rousseau's Education Concerning Being, Science, and Happiness

Description: Is there a relationship between science and happiness and, if so, what is it? Clearly, since the Enlightenment, science has increased life expectancy and bodily comfort. Is this happiness, or do humans long for something more? To examine these questions, I investigate the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Specifically, I focus on the Discourses and the Emile, as he states in the Confessions that these works form a whole statement concerning the natural goodness of man. I agree with the literature… more
Date: August 2017
Creator: Gross, Benjamin Isaak
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Partner: UNT Libraries
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Art Unfettered: Bergson and a Fluid Conception of Art

Description: This dissertation applies philosopher Henri Bergson's methodology and his ideas of duration and creativity to the definitional problem of art, particularly as formulated within analytic aesthetics. In mid-20th century, analytic aesthetics rejected essentialist definitions of art, but within a decade, two predominant definitions of art emerged as answers to the anti-essentialism of the decade prior: functionalism and proceduralism. These two definitions define art, respectively, in terms of the … more
Date: August 2018
Creator: Thompson, Seth Aaron
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Creative Matter: Exploring the Co-Creative Nature of Things

Description: This dissertation is about new materialism as it relates to art education. It is a speculative inquiry that seeks to illuminate the interconnectivity of things by considering the ways in which things participate in generative practices of perceiving and making. To do so, the dissertation pioneers an arts-based methodology that allows for broad considerations about who and what can be considered an agent in the process of art making. In this inquiry, the researcher is an artist-participant wi… more
Date: December 2018
Creator: Hood, Emily Jean
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Partner: UNT Libraries
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The Question Concerning Endocrinology: Judith Butler's Gender Theory and Transgender Hormone Therapy

Description: For such a vexing topic as gender identity, this dissertation asks a rather straightforward question: If gender identity is—as Judith Butler has asserted—socially constructed and discursively mediated, then why does transgender hormone therapy (THT) work? This is the question concerning endocrinology that I ask Butler, and their answer is, if requiring of delicate assessment and interpretation, clear: it doesn't. Butler's work reveals an admonishing view that the efficacity of THT is due to pla… more
Date: July 2023
Creator: Toole, Violet Ann
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Everything and the Kitchen Sink; or, Towards an Understanding of a Creative Practice, "Codex Symphonia," Metamodernism, and Rhizomic Composition

Description: Creativity is not a hierarchical, but an intertextual, rhizomic process, pulling from a vast array of interests, experiences, and influences. These feed into each other, to inform and motivate artists as creating persons in an ongoing process we call the creative act. Anytime an artist sets out to make something, they are experiencing a dynamic yet concentrated moment of energy in the chaotic cloud of creativity. To demonstrate this, I explore several ideas that inform my piece, Codex Symphonia… more
Date: May 2023
Creator: Reeder, Kory
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Environmental Philosophy after Standing Rock

Description: In 2016, An estimated 15,000 people representing 400 Indigenous Nations and non-indigenous allies gathered at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in solidarity against the Dakota Access Pipeline to protect Mni Sose, the Missouri River. They became known as the Water Protectors. This dissertation analyzes the response in environmental philosophy journals to the #noDAPL protest at Standing Rock. Even though the Stand at Standing Rock became one of the most important and monumental environmental … more
Date: August 2021
Creator: Gessas, William Jeffrey
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Metal, Pedagogy, Women, Kuwait: An Autoethnographic Feminist Approach to Questioning Systems of Education

Description: This research seeks to explore how the metal arts are taught to women in Kuwait in an undergraduate setting, making the call for the use of feminist pedagogy when teaching the metal arts to women in Kuwait. This research is achieved using the qualitative methodology of analytic autoethnography. The theoretical framework is a feminist lens bridging the social construction of gender with the gendering of objects and feminist standpoint theory. The data comes from the experiences of creating three… more
Date: May 2021
Creator: Alayar, Moneerah
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Transhumanism: An Ontology of the World's Most Dangerous Idea

Description: Transhumanism is the name given to the cultural and philosophical movement which advocates radical human technological enhancement. In what follows, I use perspectives drawn from existential philosophy to problematize transhumanists' desire to recast human finitude as a series of technical problems with technical solutions. The ontological account of transhumanism offered here questions the assumed benefit and inevitability across six chapters. Following an introductory chapter, Chapter 2 intro… more
Date: May 2019
Creator: Ross, Benjamin David
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Partner: UNT Libraries
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Nature's Patrons: Private Sector Engagement and Powerful Environmentalisms

Description: In this dissertation, I examine the role of private sector engagement in environmental governance. The relationship between mainstream environmentalism and the private sector has moved from one of general hostility to one of constructive engagement in recent times. As a result, the traditional distinctions between environmental non-governmental organizations and private corporations have become blurred, making way for public-private hybrids, facilitated by frameworks of philanthropy, sponsorshi… more
Date: May 2018
Creator: Ward, Nora Catherine
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Partner: UNT Libraries
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Orca Recovery by Changing Cultural Attitudes (ORCCA): How Anthropocentrism and Capitalism Led to an Endangered Species in Puget Sound

Description: Ways of understanding, living, and communicating with non-human species, and more specifically endangered species, have been thought of dualistically and hierarchically in Western cultures. This type of thinking is harmful when examining environmental issues that involve more than just humans, which is arguably all environmental issues. By enforcing a nature/culture dichotomy, humans are seen as separate from nature and therefore they can ethically excuse themselves from dealing with environmen… more
Date: May 2020
Creator: Jandick, Brittany
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Partner: UNT Libraries

The Food-Drug Relationship in Health and Medicine

Description: In this dissertation, I apply Gadamerian philosophical hermeneutics to examine interpretations of the food-drug relationship within the contexts of health and medicine. Assumptions regarding the relationship between these categories undergird a substantial academic discourse and function as key components in worldviews beyond the academy. Despite this, little work has been done in foregrounding them to allow for critique and consideration of alternative perspectives. Unearthing philosophical as… more
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Date: May 2019
Creator: Tuminello, Joseph Anthony, III
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Partner: UNT Libraries

Francis Bacon's New Atlantis: The Quiet Revolution of Science, Religion, and Politics

Description: Francis Bacon (1561-1626) is recognized as a founder of the modern scientific project and a forerunner of the modern era of political thought. He advocated the development of an active science that would enable human beings to control nature in order to relieve man's estate. To accomplish this, Bacon argues that we must reconstruct all arts and sciences upon a more solid foundation. In reconstructing the arts and sciences, Bacon subtly changes the meaning of foundational religious, political, a… more
Date: May 2021
Creator: Lowe, Evan M.
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Partner: UNT Libraries
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Thinking Outside the Pipe: The Role of Participatory Water Ethics and Watershed Education Community Action Networks (WE CANs) in the Creation of a New Urban Water Narrative

Description: According to the United Nations, two-thirds of the world's population, approximately 4 billion people, experiences water scarcity at least one month per year. To avoid the water quantity crisis experienced in many regions of the world and the United States, a path to sustainability must be forged. My research aims to identify and critique the salient features of the narrative that drives contemporary urban water decisions and practices and to provide a meta-narrative about the role of narrative… more
Date: December 2022
Creator: Moss, Teresa Jo
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Partner: UNT Libraries
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Catastrophe in Permanence: Benjamin's Natural History of Environmental Crisis

Description: Walter Benjamin warned in 1940 of a certain inconspicuous threat to political thinking, not least of all to materialism, that takes progress as an historical norm. Implicit in this conception is what he describes as an empty continuum of time along which the prevailing tradition chronicles its own mythic development and drains everyday life of genuine historical experience. The myth of progressive history advances insidiously today in consumeristic and technocratic attempts at reconciling cultu… more
Date: May 2017
Creator: Bower, Matthew S.
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Perceiving Indeterminacy: A Theoretical Framework of the Perceptual Rite of Passage for Preadolescents

Description: It is the fundamental insight of phenomenology that meaning is first and foremost - not something which we intellectually reflect on. It is not a product of the mind reworking raw, perceptual experiences. Rather meaning, and our connection to the world, are perceptual phenomena. Thus, to understand the ways in which children find meaning demands a turn toward perceptual experiences - how children see and feel. In this theoretical dissertation, I explore questions of perceptual experiences throu… more
Date: August 2018
Creator: Herman, David
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Partner: UNT Libraries
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Toward an Ecocentric Philosophy of Energy in a Time of Transition

Description: Ecocentrism is a philosophical position developed in the field of environmental philosophy that offers an alternative view of the complex relationships between humans and the nonhuman world. This dissertation develops an ecocentric philosophy of energy in order to account for a wider set of ethics and values dimensions involved in energy politics. It focuses especially on inter-species justice as a crucial missing element behind even those energy policies that seek to transition society from fo… more
Date: August 2018
Creator: Frigo, Giovanni
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Toward a Rationale for Music Education in the Public School Context Framed with both Progressive and Essentialist Considerations: Operationalizing the Ideas of William Chandler Bagley

Description: In music education, aesthetic education and praxial music education serve as two major, guiding philosophical frameworks, yet supporters of each often conflict with one another. Furthermore, both are slightly problematic with respect to the specific context of the public school. Each framework is primarily music-based, however, music education has existed in the wider context of general education since the 1830s. Given the recent core-status designation for music education, as part of all fi… more
Date: May 2016
Creator: Price, Benjamin J., 1980-
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The Conceptual Autopoiēsis of Language-Habits and Language-Cultures that Orient Humans as Separate from Nature

Description: In this dissertation I consider the nature of the relationship between orientation and language-habits in the context of environmental ethics. Specifically, I focus on the problem of orientation as a way of understanding the unabated trend of anthropocentrism in the dominant Western language-culture. Orientation operates as the attitudes, beliefs, and feelings in relation to something that we embody in our lived experiences. One way that we communicate our orientation in relation to the land is… more
Date: August 2019
Creator: Williams, Justin W
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Inflammatory Biomarker Levels and Vaccine Response

Description: This study was conducted as part of a parent grantwhich examined the relationship between components of sleep and antibody responses to the flu vaccine in a population of 392 nurses working at two large hospitals. During/after sleep data was collected, nurses had blood drawn at four time points: immediately pre-vaccination, 1-, 6-, and 11-months post vaccine to obtain serum for detection of anti-influenza antibodies measured with an HI (hemagglutination inhibition) assay. Additionally, the infl… more
Date: May 2022
Creator: Alkire, Christopher B
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Participation in the Play of Nature: A Hermeneutic Approach to Environmental Aesthetics

Description: Within the environmental aesthetics literature, there is a noticeable schism between two general approaches to understanding the aesthetic value of nature: the ambient approach and the narrative approach. Ambient thinkers focus on the character of aesthetic appreciation of nature, the way in which one is embedded in multi-sensory environment. These ambient theorists emphasize the importance of those aesthetic experiences that are difficult to articulate. Narrative thinkers argue that aesthetic … more
Date: December 2020
Creator: Aloi, Michael Joseph
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Hermeneutic Environmental Philosophy: Identity, Action, and the Imagination

Description: One of the major themes in environmental philosophy in the twenty-first century has broadly focused on how we experience and value the natural world. Along those lines, the driving question I take up in this project is if our ordinary experiences are seen as interpretations, what is the significance of this for our moral claims about the environment? Drawing on the hermeneutic philosophies of Hans Georg-Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, I examine environmental interpretation as it relates particularly … more
Date: December 2020
Creator: Bell, Nathan M.
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Partner: UNT Libraries
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