A radiant forest: Reported mystery, hazard simulation, and the moderated sublime

This dissertation investigates a series of textual and landscape strategies revolving around core issues of intention, naturalness, and disclosure. The following chapters present a range of exemplary simulation methods and texts on the construction and maintenance of experimental falsificative apparatuses.;The writing reviews specific landscape preference and simulation projects, situates them within historical context, and isolates an appetence that emerges and repeats across the centuries: Can we effect periodic moments of astonishment by judicious deployment of mild hazards, facilitating a satisfying ratio of mystery to perceived danger?;Variations on the question appear in sources ranging from Uvedale Price's gardening treatises to Stephen and Rachel Kaplan's preference matrices. There evolves an interest in a dependable simulation format to serve as test apparatus for experiments to calibrate our understanding of landscape preference. Can we effect fine adjustments to the risk-mystery calculus in order to achieve a reliable state of moderated sublimity? Is there a mechanism capable of anticipating the number and location of Burkean frisson nodes necessary to install within a subtending network of precaution to elicit optimum satisfaction?;This dissertation asks if a reinvigorated Eidophusikon might serve as such an apparatus---a tool with which we can deploy our understanding of simulation and scenic assessment to prototype settings in which individuals are subject to a regular influx of mysterious landscape values in exacting proportions. Drawing upon Loutherbourg's advances, the hope of this writing is to bolster further preference studies with enhanced and more closely correlated simulations.;At the same time, future researchers may draw upon this constellation of related works as they investigate the falsificative impulse in environmental social science literature. An important aspect of this dissertation is the suggestion of links between the work of simulation and the fabrication of languor---the false and the slow. In this sense, the aim of these pages is both an inversion and extension of Bachelard's project in The Dialectic of Duration. If Bachelard's was an effort to provide an introduction to the teaching of a philosophy of repose, the following may be seen as a guide to the repose of philosophy.