A Monte Carlo simulation was used to generate data for a comparison of five robust regression estimation methods with ordinary least squares (OLS) under 36 different outlier data configurations. Two of the robust estimators, Least Absolute Value (LAV) estimation and MM estimation, are commercially available. Three authormodified variations on MM were also included (MM1, MM2, and MM3). Design parameters that were varied include sample size (n=60 and n=180), number of independent predictor variables (2, 3 and 6), outlier density (0%, 5% and 15%) and outlier location (2x,2y s, 8x8y s, 4x,8y s and 8x,4y s). Criteria on which the regression methods were measured are relative efficiency, bias and a test of the null hypothesis. Results indicated that MM2 was the best performing robust estimator on relative efficiency. The best performing estimator on bias was MM1. The best performing regression method on the test of the null hypothesis was MM2. Overall, the MM-type robust regression methods outperformed OLS and LAV on relative efficiency, bias, and the test of the null hypothesis.

This thesis examines the environmental and social consequences of maintaining the artificial divide between thinking and feeling, mind and matter, logos and eros. New Orleans, a city where the natural environment and human sensuality are both dominant forces, is used as a case study to explore the implications of our attempts to impose rational controls on nature - both physical and human nature. An analysis of New Orleans leading up to and immediately following Hurricane Katrina (2005) reveals that the root of the trouble in the city is not primarily environmental, technological, political, or sociological, but philosophical: there is something amiss in the relationship between human rationality and the corporeal world. I argue that policy decisions which do not include the contributions of experts from the humanities and qualitative social sciences - persons with expertise on human emotions, intentions, priorities and desires - will continue to be severely compromised.

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 purpose that art serves and in terms of the conventions in place that confer the status of art onto artifacts. Despite other important definitions (including historical and intentionalist definitions), much of the literature in the analytic field of aesthetics center on the functional/procedural dichotomy, and this dichotomy is an exclusive one insofar as the two definitions appear incompatible with each other when it comes to art. I use Bergson's methodology to demonstrate that the tension between functionalism and proceduralism is an artificial one. In turn, abandoning the strict dichotomy between these two definitions of art opens the way for a more fluid conception of art. Using Bergson's application of duration and creativity to problems of laughter and morality, I draw parallels to what a Bergsonian characterization would entail.

In this dissertation I address urban sustainability with a focus on loss of cultural heritage and ecological knowledge by expanding the concept “extinction of experience” (EoE). Conceptualized by conservationist Robert Michael Pyle, EoE is the loss of nature experiences leading to apathy towards biodiversity and degradation of the common habitat. I expand upon Pyle’s formulation of the concept by considering the EoE cycle as an indirect driver that amplifies biodiversity losses. Additionally, I introduce the analysis of interrelated losses of biological and cultural diversity in relation to EoE. With a biocultural approach I discuss that EoE is tied to the infrastructural inertia within the global urban economy. I propose that addressing the EoE cycle is critical in that as a complex and multi-faceted process, it cements threats to biological and cultural diversity as permanent fixtures within society by obscuring their significance in light of economic development. This cycle remains a hidden problematic in that it perpetuates the environmental crisis while making such losses invisible within day-to-day lifestyle habits, constructing an emerging urban culture within the global economy that is ignorant of ecological processes and sustainability requirements. I frame the implications of EoE with an analysis of the newly proposed revisions …

The majority of people on Earth now live in cities, and estimates hold that 60 percent of the world’s cities have yet to be built. Now is the time for philosophers to develop a philosophy of the city to address the forthcoming issues that urbanization will bring. In this dissertation, I respond to this need for a philosophy of the city by developing a theory of city identity, developing some of the theory’s normative implications, illustrating the theory with a case study, and outlining the nature and future of philosophy of the city more generally. Indeed, this dissertation is only a part of my larger project of founding and institutionalizing this new field of both academic and socially-engaged philosophical activity. Throughout the history of the discipline, other areas such a personal identity have received numerous considerations, along with the concept of identity as an abstraction. For example, there is a bounty of research addressing problems pertaining to how objects and people retain an identity over time and claims about identity in general. While one could argue that cities are not any different than any other object, such an account fails to consider that a city’s dynamic nature makes it dissimilar …

This dissertation aims to explain the conditions under which expertise can undermine democratic decision making. I argue that the root of the conflict between expertise and democracy lies in what I call insufficiently “representative” expertise – that is forms of scientific research that are not relevant to the policy questions at hand and that fail to make visible their hidden values dimensions. I claim that the scholarly literature on the problem of expertise fails to recognize and address the issue correctly, because it does not open the black box of scientific methodologies. I maintain that only by making sense of the methodological choices of experts in the context of policy making can we determine the relevance of research and reveal the hidden socio-political values and consequences. Using the case of natural gas fracking, I demonstrate how expert contributions – even though epistemically sound – can muddle democratic policy processes. I present four case studies from controversies about fracking to show how to contextualize scientific methodologies in the pertinent political process. I argue that the common problem across all case studies is the failure of expertise to sufficiently represent stakeholders’ problems and concerns. In this context, “representation” has three criteria: (1) …

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 placebo effect, in turn brought on by the bewitchment of the trans* who seeks medical transition. In a logic similar to sin and salvation, if only the trans* had not believed in gender dysphoria, then there would be no (putative) efficacity to THT whatsoever. With our answer, we begin a perilous adventure of discovering just why such a preeminent gender theorist (and trans* themselves) with no experience of gender dysphoria, and no desire to medically transition, would say this. We examine Butler's gender theory, their concept of desire, their views on the self, on transsexuality, their rarely discussed philosophies of science and nature, and their dearth of citations of transsexual voices. Due to this lack, I lend my own, relying upon my experience with gender dysphoria, THT, …

This dissertation takes up the question of the social function of philosophy. Popular accounts of the nature and value of philosophy reinforce long-standing perceptions that philosophy is useless or irrelevant to pressing societal problems. Yet, the increasingly neoliberal political-economic environment of higher education places a premium on mechanisms that link public funding for research to demonstrations of return on investment in the form of benefitting broader society. This institutional situation presents a philosophical problem warranting professional attention. This project offers a diagnosis of the problem and develops a way forward from it. Drawing from Foucauldian archaeological methods, my analysis focuses on the interplay of institutional structures and intellectual practices. Since the early 20th century, departments of philosophy on college and university campuses have been the center of gravity for professional philosophy in the US. Establishing this institutional ‘home' for philosophers drove the adoption of disciplinary practices, norms, and standards for inquiry. But the metaphilosophical assumptions underpinning disciplinarity have become problematic, I argue: they are poor guides for navigating the situation of higher education in the 21st century. Several movements within the profession of philosophy during the 1960s and 70s sought to reverse philosophers' general retreat from public affairs. Applied philosophy, …

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 protests of the last decade, neither Standing Rock nor the Water Protectors appear in environmental philosophy journals at all--not once. Why? I suggest a possible answer by exploring the Stand of the Water Protectors as a moment in a much longer continuous history of resistance to settler colonialism. Settler colonialism attempts to facilitate the erasure of Indigenous populations by colonial ones, in order to gain access to territory—to land. The omission of Standing Rock from environmental philosophy journals represents the ease with which environmental philosophy can become complicit in the project of settler colonial erasure and replacement through absence. Drawing on Indigenous land-based philosophies of kinship, Latin American decolonial philosophy, settler colonial theory, and frameworks of Indigenous environmental justice, I show how the geo-politics of colonialism have …

Farmer suicide is at crisis levels in the United States and India. This crisis is both a problem of experiential knowledge within infrastructure as well as a problem of discourse power. I argue that the logical abstraction required to conceptualize and evaluate farmer suicide cannot be separated from the overall experience of farmer suicide. Rather than existing as distinctly separate phenomena, these elements are co-constitutive. Despite the Centers' for Disease Control identification and designation of farmer suicide as complex, statistically relevant, and elevated, nearly all the policy efforts addressing farmer suicide focus on narrow economic impact and narrow economic relief. While these economic vectors are important, the problem is multifaceted and requires a broadening of policy discourse to include additional factors (e.g. philosophical, existential, psychological, etc.). Using Hannah Arendt's work on politics and the human condition, I connect the conditionality of homo faber (human fabricator/maker), animal laborans (laboring animal), and vita activa (active life) with farmer struggle and suicide. Through the work of Georges Canguilhem and Achille Mbembe, I critique and analyze the predominant discourse and framing of suicide as a disease. Last, but not least, I propose decolonial theory and degrowth theory as viable critical pathways to shift the …

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 introduces the key players, and present the philosophy of transhumanism and the opposing view of bioconservativism. Chapter 3 offers a narrative of transhumanism beginning with its mythical antecedents, and proceeds to describe the emergence of contemporary transhumanist institutions. Chapter 4 focuses on the challenge that transhumanists Aubrey de Grey and Ray Kurzweil present to mortality. The chapter asks whether human immortality is a coherent idea, and consider the consequences of achieving a data-driven amortality. Chapter 5 continues the analysis of transhumanism as it challenges limits to knowledge (ignorance), and limits to well-being (suffering). Ray Kurzweil is presented as a key figure of transhumanist thought, along with David Pearce, who desires to eradicate suffering through genetic engineering. The hubris of transhumanism is viewed through the lens of Friedrich Nietzsche in chapter 6. Nietzsche's critique of …

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, sponsorship, and corporate social responsibility. Connected to these broader reconfigurations in environmental governance are simultaneous alterations in the normative framework of mainstream environmentalism. Ideologically, environmental policy and neoliberalism are now intertwined, entangling assumptions about nature and culture, and reflected in the popularization of environmental protection mechanisms that are deeply embedded in the values of the market economy. Analyzing particular examples of such engagements, and informed by Gramscian theory, I analyze the connections between rising corporate presence in mainstream environmentalism and broader normative and practical change, focusing, in particular, on the frameworks of ecomodernism and the Green Economy. I argue that contemporary private sector engagement in environmentalism leads to the support, production and construction of powerful environmentalisms: environmental ideologies and practices that gain power from, not in spite of, prevailing dominant interests. As such, these powerful environmentalisms …

There is great expectation that oil development in Ghana will catapult the nation towards prosperity and lead to drastic improvement in the wellbeing of Ghanaians. However, there is also concern that Ghana could fail to achieve these due to the resource curse notwithstanding the fact that scholars of the curse have yet to agree on the inevitability of the curse. Resource curse scholars adduce different reasons for its occurrence or absence. One thing common among the scholars, however, is that none discusses environmental justice in the context of the curse. In this dissertation, I examine Ghana's attempts at avoiding the resource curse through policymaking and implementation using the Guidelines on Environmental Assessment and Management of Ghana's offshore oil sector as a case study. I argue that a strong environmental justice frame is required to avert the curse in Ghana. Specifically, I assess the policy process in Ghana's oil sector, the institutional framework for managing the sector, and analyze the perception of environmental justice for policymaking. The outcome of these assessments show that although the policy process requires broadening for full and effective participation, Ghana has checks and balances policies to avert the resource curse and to deliver environmental justice in …

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 environmental issues that happen "out there" in nature. This thesis explores two manifestations of this nature/culture separation as it continues to threaten wild orca populations in Puget Sound. The first is because of an anthropocentric culture and the second is because of the capitalist socio-economic system. The anthropocentric part of this type of thinking raises humans up on a pedestal, above all non-human species. It gives humans the excuse to only care about issues that affect them directly. The capitalistic part of this type of thinking enforces human's exploitation and commodification of nature. I argue that anthropocentrism and capitalism together create a human/nature relationship that harms nature and benefits humans. This relationship is illustrated by a small population of orcas, called the Southern Resident Killer Whales (SRKW), off the coast of Washington …

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 assumptions within various fields, epistemic systems, and regulatory bodies, I classify food-drug interpretations into two main categories: dichotomous interpretations of the categories of "food" and "drugs" as ontologically distinct, and continuum-based interpretations where these categories overlap. Rather than arguing for a single appropriate way of understanding the food-drug relationship, my project aims to disclose the complexities of both sets of interpretations, illustrating their virtues and vices, and underscoring the need for people to call their own interpretations into question while taking seriously those of others. The dialogical structure of philosophical hermeneutics provides a useful foundation for dialogue within and between dichotomous and continuum-based interpretations. We do not have unmediated access to a mind-independent reality, the terms "food" and "drugs" do not necessarily refer to natural kinds, and all interpretations likely have different degrees of strengths …

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 narratives as invisible lenses through which individuals see, interpret, and interact with the world often without realizing the existence of those frames. The purpose of this problem-oriented dissertation is twofold: to provide a philosophical policy analysis of contemporary water issues in the United States generally and North Central Texas in particular, and to offer a pragmatic and interdisciplinary approach to discovering a sustainable relationship to water. The intent of my research is not to produce a new metaphysical understanding of water, but to provide a pragmatic application of ideas that can be utilized in the field; ideas that can invoke a new narrative, vision, and direction for urban water issues in North Central Texas and in areas far beyond the Lone Star State. …

In 2016, the Colombian Constitutional Court recognized the Atrato River as a subject of rights based on the theory of biocultural rights. This dissertation analyzes a new legal concept that aims to defend the rights to a good life for humans and other-than-human co-inhabitants who share river ecosystems, focusing on the case of the Atrato River in Colombia. The 3Hs framework of biocultural ethics is adopted to interconnect complex and interrelated historical, biophysical, cultural, and political dimensions. With this analysis, broader biocultural approaches are suggested. They could be valuable for understanding and implementing biocultural rights in other world regions. Moreover, it could transform the current situation that destroys biocultural diversity toward public policies that favor more just and sustainable forms of co-inhabiting biocultural diversity. A primary limitation of the implementation of biocultural rights is the context of a "failed state," in which the Colombian State is subject to severe problems of corruption, illegal mining, conflicts between legal and illegal armed groups, and drug trafficking. There is a need for a dialogue solution to the conflict. This requires that illegal armed groups are valued as co-inhabitants. Achieving social-environmental justice is essential for biocultural ethics. In this case, it is the condition …

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 cultural imagery with organic nature. In this dissertation, I pursue the contradictions of such images as they crystallize around the natural history of twenty-first century commodity society, where promises of ecological remediation, sustainable urban development, and climate change mitigation have yet to introduce a true crisis of historical experience to the ongoing environmental crisis of capitalism. A more radical way of seeing the cultural representation of nature would, I argue, penetrate its mythic determination by market forces and bear witness to the natural-historical ruins and traces that constitute, in Benjamin's terms, a single "catastrophe" where others perceive historical continuity. I argue that Benjamin's critique of progress is instructive to interpreting those utopian dreams, ablaze in consumer life and technological fantasy, that recent decades of growing environmental concern …

This dissertation provides a feminist restorative model of environmental justice that addresses the injustices found within UNICOR’s e-waste recycling operations. A feminist restorative environmental justice challenges the presupposition that grassroots efforts, law and policy, medical and scientific research, and theoretical pursuits (alone or in conjunction) are sufficient to address the emotional and relational harm of environmental injustices. To eliminate environmental harms, this model uses collaborative dialogue for interested parties to prevent environmental harm. To encourage participation, a feminist restorative model accepts many forms of knowledge and truth as ‘legitimate’ and offers an opportunity for women to share how their personal experiences of love, violence, and caring differ from men and other women and connect to larger social practices. This method of environmental justice offers opportunities for repair, reparation and reintegration that can transform perspectives on criminality, dangerous practices and structures in the PIC, and all persons who share in a restorative encounter.

Critiques of the environmental ramifications of the early Genesis narrative by environmental thinkers such as Aldo Leopold, Ian McHarg, and Lynn White underscore a longstanding tension between the environmental movement and Western Christianity. The evangelical community (EC) especially, has been at odds with the environmental movement, as the EC grounds its theology regarding human relations to nature on the Genesis narrative—and especially the Genesis 1:26-28 dominion mandate— interpreted with a literal hermeneutic. The EC generally concludes in favor of either a dominionist interpretation, that mankind has dominion over nature, or a stewardship interpretation, that mankind’s dominion is more akin to tending or stewarding than to domination. Both interpretations trend toward the anthropocentrism that Leopold, McHarg, and White criticize. J. Baird Callicott postulates a third, less anthropocentric view: the citizenship interpretation, that humanity is co-citizen with nonhuman beings, rather than a superior. Callicott’s view, while commendable on key points, is incompatible with EC methodology because it is grounded only on Genesis 2 and subsequent passages, rejecting the legitimacy of Genesis 1:26-28 altogether. A fourth interpretation is proposed here, redacted dominionism, derived using EC methodology, and claiming that human relations to nature are based on theocentric themes. Redacted dominionism understands humanity as …

I challenge the dualistic view of wilderness that has influenced wilderness philosophy, politics and experience in recent years. In its place, I offer an alternative vision that recognizes wilderness areas and working landscapes as complementary elements of a larger, inhabited landscape characterized by a heterogeneous mixture of human-land relational patterns representing various points along an urban-wilderness continuum. In chapters 2 through 4, I explore the philosophical, political and experiential implications of this wilderness-in-context vision. Experienced and understood as part of the landscape we call home, wilderness may engender, renew, and sustain an engaged and integrated wilderness practice involving regular contact with wilderness places, committed activism on behalf of wild lands and their inhabitants, and grounded reflection on the meaning and value of wilderness in our everyday lives.

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 fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. The goal is to develop an ecocentric philosophy of energy that accounts for the fundamental and deep ecological interdependences of human and nonhuman animals, plants, and other living and non-living beings. I start with an introduction and a summary of the chapters followed in chapter 2 by a clarification of the terms "paradigm" and "energy." In chapter 3 I offer an exploration of the origins of the "energy paradigm" or the predominant understanding of energy that emerged during modernity (18th century onwards). The modern energy paradigm progressively became a "traditional" forma mentis that is nonetheless based on flawed presuppositions about the human-energy-nature relationship. I criticize the homogeneous, colonizing and hegemonic nature of this paradigm, unveil its tacit anthropocentric and instrumental …

A shift is occurring in environmentalism to a post-metaphysical understanding of the human relationship to nature. Stemming from developments within the wilderness debate, ecofeminism, and eco-phenomenology, the old dichotomy between John Muir's tradition of privileging nature and Gifford Pinchot's tradition of privileging society is giving way to a relational paradigm that privileges neither. The starting point for this involves articulating the ontology of relationship anew. Insofar as the dominant metaphors of nature and their complimentary narratives present a choice between the agency of the human or the natural worlds, they encourage one-sided or "reactive" relationships to the world. By contrast, developments sensitive to the mutual agency between them encourage "responsive" relationships. The relational metaphors of "partnership" (Merchant) and "dialogue" (Plumwood) are prominent examples. The idea of "nonhuman agency," however, is counter-intuitive and problematic. The works of Buber, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty suggest a model of "mutual response" rather than "mutual agency."

During the past two decades, one of the positive developments in academia has been the emergence of a sizable literature pertaining to ecological education-the theory and practice of preparing children and adults alike for ecologically responsible citizenship. Gregory A. Smith, David W. Orr, and C. A. Bowers are three of the more prolific writers in the field. Smith critiques modern primary and secondary education and argues for, and paints a picture of, an alternative "green pedagogy" that seeks to inculcate in students strong community and ecological values. Orr focuses on the social and ethical problems associated with the environmental crisis and the changes that colleges and universities need to make in order to become propagators of, rather than impediments to, a widespread diffusion of ecological literacy. Bowers emphasizes the role that ecologically problematic modern cultural assumptions play in blinkering the ecological vision of most educational theorists and in preventing the flowering of an eco-justice pedagogy. Each writer seeks the transformation of both education and culture with a view toward realizing ecological sustainability, strong communities, social justice, and moral edification. They neglect or ignore some important subjects, including animal welfare ethics, politics, and corporate influence on governments.