Creativity has often been declared, especially by philosophers, as the last frontier of science. The assumption is that it will defy explanation forever. I will defend two claims in order to oppose this assumption and to demystify creativity: (1) the perspective that creativity cannot be explained wrongly identifies creativity with what I shall call metaphysical freedom; (2) the Darwinian approach to creativity, a prominent naturalistic account of creativity, fails to give an explanation of (...) class='Hi'>creativity, because it confuses conceptual issues with explanation. I will close with some remarks on the status and differences in some explanations available in contemporary cognitive science. (shrink)

Creativity has received, and continues to receive, comparatively little analysis in philosophy and the brain and behavioural sciences. This is in spite of the importance of creative thought and action, and the many and varied resources of theories of mind. Here an alternative approach to analyzing creativity is suggested: start from the bottom up with minimally creative thought. Minimally creative thought depends non-accidentally upon agency, is novel relative to the acting agent, and could not have been tokened before (...) the time it is in fact tokened, relative to the agent in question. Thoughts that meet these three conditions—agency, psychological novelty, and modal—are what may be called cognitive breakthroughs. Even if such breakthroughs are not necessary to or definitive of richer creativity, they are indeed central to much of creativity. The minimal analysis provides a more workable explanandum for theories of creativity of varied motivation and method. (shrink)

The creative aspect of language use provides a set of phenomena that a science of language must explain. It is the “central fact to which any signi- ficant linguistic theory must address itself” and thus “a theory of language that neglects this ‘creative’ aspect is of only marginal interest” (Chomsky 1964: 7–8). Therefore, the form and explanatory depth of linguistic science is restricted in accordance with this aspect of language. In this paper, the implications of the creative aspect of language (...) use for a scientific theory of language will be discussed, noting the possible further implications for a science of the mind. It will be argued that a corollary of the creative aspect of language use is that a science of language can study the mechanisms that make language use possible, but that such a science cannot explain how these mechanisms enter into human action in the form of language use. (shrink)

This chapter explores the philosophical case for thinking of imagination and creativity as skills. Though the philosophical discussion of this topic has generally operated on two separate tracks, one focused on developing a framework for treating imagination as a skill and one focused on developing a framework for treating creativity as a skill, the goal of the chapter is to bring these two tracks together. After the philosophical case for treating imagination and creativity as skills has been (...) fleshed out, the discussion turns to a consideration of objections. Though some of these objections concern only the skill-based framework for imagination and others concern only the skill-based framework for creativity, some of the objections apply to both. Responses to the objections are then offered. The chapter concludes with an exploration of how treating imagination and creativity as skills might shed light on the relationship between imagination and creativity. (shrink)

Abstract: The study aimed to identify the creative behavior in the Palestinian civil organizations between reality and expectations, and the study used the descriptive analytical approach and the questionnaire as a main tool for collecting data from employees of associations operating in the governorates of Gaza Strip, and the cluster sample method was used and the sample size was (343) individuals and has been recovered (298) Resolution. The following results were reached: The relative weight of the measure of creative behavior (...) was 78.99 (%), and there were no statistically significant differences in creative behavior according to the gender variable, age group, educational qualification, specialization, while the results indicated that there were differences according to the number of years of service. The study presented a set of recommendations, the most important of which are: the necessity of working to follow up the strategic plan for NGOs using electronic messages as it paves the way for achieving excellence and creativity in the field of work, the need to hold meetings and workshops with the local community and this helps them determine the needs of the community. (shrink)

Three kinds of things may be creative: persons, processes, and products. The standard definition of creativity, used nearly by consensus in psychological research, focuses specifically on products and says that a product is creative if and only if it is new and valuable. We argue that at least one further condition is necessary for a product to be creative: it must have been produced by the right kind of process. We argue furthermore that this point has an interesting epistemological (...) implication: when you judge a product to be creative--attributing creativity--you are not just judging it to be new and valuable. Even if you did not witness how it was produced, you are also making a judgement about how it was produced. (shrink)

This chapter considers the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to exhibit creativity and imagination, in light of recent advances in generative AI and the use of deep neural networks (DNNs). Reasons for doubting that AI exhibits genuine creativity or imagination are considered, including the claim that the creativity of an algorithm lies in its developer, that generative AI merely reproduces patterns in its training data, and that AI is lacking in a necessary feature for creativity or (...) imagination, such as consciousness, agency, metacognitive awareness, or the use of mental imagery. In each case, a counterargument is provided that AI already has or soon will overcome the apparent barrier. In some instances, this is because the critical features deemed lacking in AI may not be necessary for human creativity and imagination either. In others, it is because important developmental and structural similarities between humans and generative AI have been insufficiently appreciated. (shrink)

In this essay we collect and put together a number of ideas relevant to the under- standing of the phenomenon of creativity, confining our considerations mostly to the domain of cognitive psychology while we will, on a few occasions, hint at neuropsy- chological underpinnings as well. In this, we will mostly focus on creativity in science, since creativity in other domains of human endeavor have common links with scientific creativity while differing in numerous other specific respects. (...) We begin by briefly introducing a few basic notions relating to cognition, among which the notion of ‘concepts’ is of basic relevance. The myriads of concepts lodged in our mind constitute a ‘conceptual space’ of an enormously complex structure, where con- cepts are correlated by beliefs that are themselves made up of concepts and are as- sociated with emotions. The conceptual space, moreover, is perpetually in a state of dynamic evolution that is once again of a complex nature. A major component of the dynamic evolution is made up of incessant acts of inference, where an inference occurs essentially by means of a succession of correlations among concepts set up with beliefs and heuristics, the latter being beliefs of a special kind, namely, ones relatively free of emotional associations and possessed of a relatively greater degree of justification. Beliefs, along with heuristics, have been described as the ‘mind’s software’, and con- stitute important cognitive components of the self-linked psychological resources of an individual. The self is the psychological engine driving all our mental and physical activity, and is in a state of ceaseless dynamics resulting from one’s most intimate ex- periences of the world accumulating in the course of one’s journey through life. Many of our psychological resources are of a dual character, having both a self-linked and a shared character, the latter being held in common with larger groups of people and imbibed from cultural inputs. We focus on the privately held self-linked beliefs of an individual, since these are presumably of central relevance in making possible inductive inferences – ones in which there arises a fundamental need of adopting a choice or making a decision. Beliefs, decisions, and inferences, all have the common link to the self of an individual and, in this, are fundamentally analogous to free will, where all of these have an aspect of non-determinism inherent in them. Creativity involves a major restructuring of the conceptual space where a sustained inferential process eventually links remote conceptual domains, thereby opening up the possibility of a large number of new correlations between remote concepts by a cascading process. Since the process of inductive inference depends crucially on de- cisions at critical junctures of the inferential chain, it becomes necessary to examine the basic mechanism underlying the making of decisions. In the framework that we attempt to build up for the understanding of scientific creativity, this role of decision making in the inferential process assumes central relevance. With this background in place, we briefly sketch the affect theory of decisions. Affect is an innate system of response to perceptual inputs received either from the exter- nal world or from the internal physiological and psychological environment whereby a positive or negative valence gets associated with a perceptual input. Almost every sit- uation faced by an individual, even one experienced tacitly, i.e., without overt aware-ness, elicits an affective response from him, carrying a positive or negative valence that underlies all sorts of decision making, including ones carried out unconsciously in inferential processes. Referring to the process of inferential exploration of the conceptual space that gener- ates the possibility of correlations being established between remote conceptual do- mains, such exploration is guided and steered at every stage by the affect system, analogous to the way a complex computer program proceeds through junctures where the program ascertains whether specified conditions are met with by way of generating appropriate numerical values – for instance, the program takes different routes, depending on whether some particular numerical value turns out to be positive or negative. The valence generated by the affect system in the process of adoption of a choice plays a similar role which therefore is of crucial relevance in inferential processes, especially in the exploration of the conceptual space where remote domains need to be linked up – the affect system produces a response along a single value dimension, resembling a number with a sign and a magnitude. While the affect system plays a guiding role in the exploration of the conceptual space, the process of exploration itself consists of the establishment of correlations between concepts by means of beliefs and heuristics, the self-linked ones among the latter having a special role in making possible the inferential journey along alternative routes whenever the shared rules of inference become inadequate. A successful access to a remote conceptual domain, necessary for the creative solution of a standing problem or anomaly – one that could not be solved within the limited domain hitherto accessed – requires a phase of relatively slow cumulative search and then, at some stage, a rapid cascading process when a solution is in sight. Representing the conceptual space in the form of a complex network, the overall process can be likened to one of self-organized criticality commonly observed in the dynamical evolution of complex systems. In order that inferential access to remote domains may actually be possible, it is necessary that restrictions on the exploration process – necessary for setting the context in ordinary instances of inductive inference – be relaxed and a relatively free exploration in a larger conceptual terrain be made possible. This is achieved by the mind going into the default mode, where external constraints – ones imposed by shared beliefs and modes of exploration – are made inoperative. While explaining all these various aspects of the creative process, we underline the supremely important role that analogy plays in it. Broadly speaking, analogy is in the nature of a heuristic, establishing correlations between concepts. However, analo- gies are very special in that these are particularly effective in establishing correlations among remote concepts, since analogy works without regard to the contiguity of the concepts in the conceptual space. In establishing links between concepts, analogies have the power to light up entire terrains in the conceptual space when a rapid cas- cading of fresh correlations becomes possible. The creative process occurs within the mind of a single individual or of a few closely collaborating individuals, but is then continued by an entire epistemic community, eventually resulting in a conceptual revolution. Such conceptual revolutions make pos- sible the radical revision of scientific theories whereby the scope of an extant theory is broadened and a new theoretical framework makes its appearance. The emerging theory is characterized by a certain degree of incommensurability when compared with the earlier one – a feature that may appear strange at first sight. But incommen- surability does not mean incompatibility and the apparently contrary features of the relation between the successive theories may be traced to the multi-layered structureof the conceptual space where concepts are correlated not by means of single links but by multiple ones, thereby generating multiple layers of correlation, among which some are retained and some created afresh in a conceptual restructuring. We conclude with the observation that creativity occurs on all scales. Analogous to correlations being set up across domains in the conceptual space and new domains being generated, processes with similar features can occur within the confines of a domain where a new layer of inferential links may be generated, connecting up sub- domains. In this context, insight can be looked upon as an instance of creativity within the confines of a domain of a relatively limited extent. (shrink)

The relationship between creativity and artificial intelligence has been recently discussed in both the expert community and the broader public, with the discussion being driven not only by the challenges of practice or academic interest but also significantly influenced by societal anxieties. Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Chat GPT, Midjourney, DALL-E, have become central to the dialogue on human/machine creativity. Questions arise: Can AI be truly creative and if so, is AI creativity of the same nature (...) as human or non-human animal creativity? If we affirm both of these questions, what implications does that hold for our future selves? This contribution establishes meaningful links of personal and collective identity bridging the debates on AI creativity and human enhancement. (shrink)

Emotional creativity (EC) is a pattern of cognitive abilities and personality traits related to originality and appropriateness in emotional experience. EC has been found to be related to various constructs across different fields of psychology during the past 30 years, but a comprehensive examination of previous research is still lacking. The goal of this review is to explore the reliability of use of the Emotional Creativity Inventory (ECI) across studies, to test gender differences and to compare levels of (...) EC in different countries. Thirty-five empirical studies focused on EC were retrieved and the coefficients required for the meta-analysis extracted. The meta-analysis revealed that women showed significantly higher EC than men (total N = 3,555). The same gender differences were also found when testing scores from three ECI subscales, i.e. emotional novelty, emotional preparedness and emotional effectiveness/authenticity. When comparing EC in 10 different countries (total N = 4,375), several cross-cultural differences were revealed. The Chinese sample showed a significantly lower average ECI total score than all the other countries. Based on the integration of results, the avenues for future research on EC and the breadth of influence of the concept of EC across different fields of psychology are discussed. Keywords: Emotional Creativity, Review, Meta-Analyses, Meta-Analysis, Definition, Emotional Creativity Inventory, ECI, Reliability, Gender Differences, Cross-cultural, Cross-culture, Personality Traits, NEO Personality Inventory, Big Five, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Openness to Experience, Introversion, Neuroticism, Emotions, Creativity, Cognition, Cognitive Abilities, Affect, Fantasy, Coping, Alexithymia, Anhedonia, Self-understanding, Motivation, Creativeness, Innovative Performance, Creative Ability, Artistic Creativity, Creative Thinking. MeSH Headings: Emotions, Creativity, Affect, Affective Symptoms, Gender, Sex, Gender Identity, Cross-Cultural Comparison, Transcultural Studies, Temperament, Extraversion, Neuroticism, Anhedonia, Creativeness, Cognition, Cognitive Function, Artistic Creativity, Creative Ability, Creative Thinking. (shrink)

This paper identifies, explores, and resolves a tension between two common ideas about creativity. The first is that a project is less creative insofar as it adheres to a formula of some kind. The second is that a project’s being carried out within a set of constraints does not necessarily make it less creative. The tension arises from the fact that formulae and constraints operate in the same manner. They reduce the set of options for an agent undertaking some (...) project. How could it be that reducing an agent’s options both does and does not make their project less creative? I resolve this tension by arguing that the first idea is false and should be replaced with the claim that a project is less creative insofar as the decisions that comprise it are dictated by a formula rather than being attributable to the agent. Finally, I employ a case study to demonstrate that there are ways in which formulae and constraints can diminish creativity and ways in which they can have no effect, or perhaps even enhance creativity. (shrink)

Creativity is commonly understood as a skill, talent, or professional capacity. However, such interpretations only scratch the surface of a much deeper phenomenon. This article presents a comprehensive philosophical inquiry into creativity as a fundamental way of knowing, rooted in awareness, expressed through passion, and guided by responsibility. It argues that true creativity does not arise from conditioned thinking or deliberate choice, but from a state of clear observation where thinking, questioning, and discovery unfold naturally. Furthermore, it (...) examines how every profession becomes a medium of creativity when aligned with one’s intrinsic perception, while also emphasizing the ethical responsibility to avoid manipulation and influence. Ultimately, creativity is explored not as an act, but as a state of being. (shrink)

Many theorists maintain that conscious intentional agency is a necessary condition of creativity. We argue that this requirement, which we call the Intentional Agency Condition (IAC), should be abandoned. We motivate this by highlighting the problems this criterion encounters in the face of recent advances in generative AI, which is ostensibly creative despite being incapable of intentional agency. We present two corpus analyses to illustrate the rapidly increasing tendency of people to predicate creativity to generative AI. In response (...) to this predicament, theorists of creativity have proposed a range of conflicting solutions, which we critically evaluate. We find that none of these satisfyingly resolves the initial predicament, and we therefore propose a novel approach. Our claim is that ascriptions of creativity are dependent on what we call creative ability. This solution explains why intentional agency is important for judgements of creativity, without being a necessary condition. Our approach thereby accommodates AI creativity without dismissing the intuition that perceived intentions are of key importance for ascriptions of creativity. (shrink)

Comparatively easy questions we might ask about creativity are distinguished from the hard question of explaining transformative creativity. Many have focused on the easy questions, offering no reason to think that the imagining relied upon in creative cognition cannot be reduced to more basic folk psychological states. The relevance of associative thought processes to songwriting is then explored as a means for understanding the nature of transformative creativity. Productive artificial neural networks—known as generative antagonistic networks (GANs)—are a (...) recent example of how a system’s ability to generate novel products can both be finely tuned by prior experience and grounded in strategies that cannot be articulated by the system itself. Further, the kinds of processes exploited by GANs need not be seen as incorporating something akin to sui generis imaginative states. The chapter concludes with reflection on the added relevance of personal character to explanations of creativity. [This is Chapter 12 of the book Explaining Imagination.]. (shrink)

This chapter explores what it can mean to say that culinary products (i.e., recipes and their outputs) are creative. It answers this question by distinguishing between three different kinds of creativity (idle, productive, and super-productive creativity) and two different kinds of creative domains, locked-in and expandable ones. It argues that culinary products can be creative in the three different ways just mentioned and that, accordingly, the creative domain constituted by the culinary arts turns out to be an expandable (...) one. (shrink)

This paper argues that creativity is not only self-expression, novelty, or talent. At its deepest, creativity is the making of a form that can bear more reality than the old form could hold. The paper begins from a familiar human experience: creative work often feels more real than ordinary life. Standard creativity research rightly emphasizes originality and effectiveness, and broader models also recognize personally meaningful creativity. Yet these views leave a deeper structural question underdescribed: why do (...) new forms become necessary at all, and why do some forms feel like a return to reality rather than an escape from it? Drawing on creativity research, Winnicott’s account of creative living, work on emotion regulation and meaning in life, and the Structural Intelligence corpus on field, form, de-fusion, fixed worth, and repair, the paper proposes a different account. Creativity begins when existing form has become too thin, too total, too captured, or too defended to carry lived reality honestly. A creative act attempts a better holder. For some people, creativity is not optional enrichment but structural necessity: a way of giving inner reality a livable form when ordinary holders are too thin. The paper distinguishes real creativity from stylish coherence, argues that creativity can function as a de-fusion practice without being identical with integration, and explains why creativity often feels like freedom: it reduces falseness by bringing life into a truer relation with form. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that there is such a thing as moral creativity with a little c, namely when agents realize innovative moral improvement in a particular context. This claim is meant as an addition to the growing field of philosophy of creativity that mainly discusses artistic and scientific creativity or historically unprecedented cases of moral creativity. With the help of two examples, I show that moral creativity also occurs in a non-historical, small-scale variant (...) that is innovative given the particularity and expectations of a specific context. Unlike other moral-philosophical accounts that focus either on groundbreaking or revolutionary moral achievements or understand moral creativity in terms of moral imagination, this paper emphasizes the significance of everyday, context-sensitive innovations in moral practice. Cases of creativity with a little c illustrate that moral progress does not always require large-scale transformation. Rather, moral improvement can emerge from adaptive and genuinely creative responses to local challenges. (shrink)

This paper proposes a foundational generative theory that precedes Brand DNA Architecture by examining a critical structural transition: the transformation of Creative-Spirit into Founding-Spirit. Human beings possess creativity as an inherent generative attribute, continuously producing thought through interaction with environment, experience, and necessity. When creativity becomes integrated with individual will, it forms Creative-Spirit—a self-contained generative structure in which judgment, execution, and responsibility are unified within the individual. However, when an individual recognizes collective necessity and establishes an enterprise, this (...) personal generative structure encounters a structural limit. An enterprise is not an extension of the individual; it is a system that incorporates the time, labor, and survival conditions of others. At this moment, Creative-Spirit can no longer remain personal. It must be transformed into a structure that others can share, interpret, and execute. This paper defines this transformation as the emergence of Founding-Spirit. Founding-Spirit is not a moral declaration, leadership attitude, or value statement. It is a structural conversion in which the generative logic of an individual’s Creative-Spirit is structurally translated into a shared generative system capable of sustaining collective judgment and action. By articulating this transition, the paper establishes a pre-Brand-DNA generative framework that explains why many organizations fail despite strong visions or values: the generative structure itself was never converted. This theoretical foundation clarifies the ontological conditions required for Brand DNA Architecture to function as a sustainable system of creation rather than a static definition of identity. (shrink)

I argue that philosophical studies of the virtues of creativity should attend to the ways that our conceptions of human creativity may be grounded in conceptions of human nature or the nature of reality. I consider and reject claims in this direction made by David Bohm and Paul Feyerabend. The more compelling candidate is the account of science, creativity, and human nature developed by the early Marx. Its guiding claim is that the forms of creativity enabled (...) by the sciences are ultimately valuable insofar as they advance our emancipation from a state of existential alienation. I end by encouraging future investigations of such vertical explanations of the significance of certain virtues in the context of scientific enquiry. (shrink)

Can human agency produce things that are genuinely creative and original? Some philosophers are skeptical. Here I argue that the case of creative activity should lead us to reexamine and ultimately expand our conception of agency. When we do this, we see that rather than being incompatible with agency, creativity offers an especially robust form of agency: a form in which agents are responsible not just for token events but for the general patterns that characterize those events as forms (...) of human activity. -/- . (shrink)

The study aimed to identify creative behavior and its impact on achieving Lean strategy in Palestinian civil organizations. The study used the descriptive analytical approach and the questionnaire as a main tool for collecting data from employees of associations operating in the governorates of Gaza Strip. The cluster sample method was used and the sample size was (343) individuals. Retrieving (298) questionnaires, and the following results were reached: The relative weight of the measure of Lean strategy was 79.04 (%), and (...) the relative weight of the measure of creative behavior was 78.99 (%), and there was a statistically significant relationship between creative behavior and Lean strategy, and the presence of an effect of creative behavior on Achieving Lean strategy, the absence of statistically significant differences in creative behavior according to the gender variable, age group, educational qualification, specialization, and the presence of statistically significant differences in Lean strategy attributable to the gender variable in dimensions (strategic sensitivity, clarity of vision, choice of strategic goals, Response speed, action) and differences were in favor of females. While there were no statistically significant differences in my dimension (shared responsibility, core capabilities) due to the gender variable, there were no statistically significant differences between the mean dimensions of Lean strategy due to the age group variable, the educational qualification, and the study presented a set of recommendations, the most important of which are: the necessity of seeking civil organizations In Gaza Strip, by obtaining funding from external countries to provide self-income for associations to face crises and give them independence in order to preserve them to carry out their role in society, the need to work to follow up on the strategic plan for NGOs using electronic messages as they pave the way to reach excellence and creativity in the field of work, The necessity of holding meetings and workshops with the local community, and this helps them to define the community's needs. (shrink)

Creativity pervades human life. It is the mark of individuality, the vehicle of self-expression, and the engine of progress in every human endeavor. It also raises a wealth of neglected and yet evocative philosophical questions. The Philosophy of Creativity takes up these questions and, in doing so, illustrates the value of interdisciplinary exchange.

There have been a number of recent readings of Daoist creativity in terms of contextual responsiveness, playfulness, flexibility, adaptivity, novelty, and epistemic virtue. These readings emphasize how the Daoist classics, the Laozi and the Zhuangzi, offer a model of agency that avoids excessive conscious intentionality, control, rigidity, dogmatism, and perspectival myopia. This paper claims that these readings, while not incorrect, are one-sidedly in favor of the “everyday” at the expense of the more “fantastical” aspects of Daoist creativity. These (...) readings appear to be rooted in an understanding of Daoist creation that mostly ignores the constant, self-causal, and absolutely inclusive nature of the Dao’s generative power. By contrast, this paper argues that Daoist creativity is better viewed as the local expression of Daoist creation, thus rendering Daoist creation itself global creativity. This view of Daoist creativity reads the famous examples of creators in Daoist texts as cases of beings who receive inspiration from, and ultimately identify with, the Dao’s or nature’s global creativity. This is a thoroughly non-supernatural notion of inspiration. Daoist creativity is thus the making explicit of Daoist creation in specific aesthetic forms and objects. This is a reading that requires championing the fantastical, paradoxical, and stranger aspects of Daoist metaphysics. Through a switch of perspective to the source of creation itself, Daoist creativity is no longer addressed only in terms of the reactive traits listed above, but rather seen in its full positive identity as an expression of the Dao’s constant self-generation. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explain why creativity is an artistic merit. Artworks and non-artworks can both be creative. But creativity does not help make many other creative things good of their kind. A creative explanation is not a better explanation in virtue of being creative. Why, then, is a creative artwork a better artwork in virtue of being creative? Understanding this will give us a better understanding of the nature of artistic merit. The approach adopted (...) in this paper is as follows. First, I say what creativity is and what an artistic merit is. Second, I identify reasons to doubt that creativity is an artistic merit. A good explanation of the merit of creativity should address these doubts. Third, I develop a theory of artistic merit that appeals to the final value of acting excellently – for example, virtuously or skilfully. Finally, I argue that this enables us to explain why creativity is an artistic merit. This account also enables us to argue that artistic merits give some things final value, and not merely instrumental value. It also provides reason to believe that ethical qualities of artworks enhance their artistic merit for the same reason creativity does. (shrink)

The role of emotional creativity in practicing creative leisure activities and in the preference of college majors remains unknown. The present study aims to explore how emotional creativity measured by the Emotional Creativity Inventory (ECI; Averill, 1999) is interrelated with the real-life involvement in different types of specific creative leisure activities and with four categories of college majors. Data were collected from 251 university students, university graduates and young adults (156 women and 95 men). Art students and (...) graduates scored significantly higher on the ECI than other majors. Humanities scored significantly higher than technical/economic majors. Five creative leisure activities were significantly correlated with the ECI, specifically, writing, painting, composing music, performing drama, and do-it-yourself home improvement. Keywords: Creativity, Emotional Creativity, Emotions, Creativeness, Affect, Feelings, Leisure Activities, Creative Ability, Artistic Creativity, Creative Thinking, Creativeness, Aging, Cognitive Deficits, Performance. MeSH Headings: Emotions, Creativity, Leisure, Leisure Activities, Hobbies, Recreation, Affect Affective Symptoms, Creativeness. (shrink)

This paper attempts to show how Adorno’s thought can illuminate our reflections on the future of work. It does so by situating Adorno’s conception of genuine activity in relation to his negativist critical epistemology and his subtle account of the distinction between true and false needs. What emerges is an understanding of work that can guide our aspirations for the future of work, and one we illustrate via discussions of creative work and care work. These are types of work which (...) cater to persistent human needs, albeit ones that are distorted under present social conditions. Adorno’s thought helps us to understand why this is the case. (shrink)

This paper explores the nature of creativity as an inherent quality of human action, questioning whether true creativity can exist through borrowed thought. It argues that while all actions may appear creative, their authenticity depends on direct perception rather than repetition rooted in memory. The inquiry suggests that creativity is not the absence of influence, but the presence of awareness in the moment of action.

This paper explores the nature of creativity and art through a phenomenological lens, arguing that genuine art does not arise from the intention to please but from direct, unmediated experience. In contrast to contemporary frameworks that position art as a tool for entertainment, validation, or consumption, this study investigates art as an act of authentic expression rooted in lived consciousness. By examining the distinction between instrumentalized creativity and pure expression, the paper reveals how intention shapes the essence of (...) artistic creation. It concludes that true art exists beyond audience-oriented motives, and its impact on others remains incidental rather than purposeful. (shrink)

Creativity is often conceived in terms of insight, innovation, and invention realized through technical mastery and skill. Challenging this individualistic model are “inventions” like writing, something that surely gave no clue to the form it would ultimately take—script—or the ways in which it would reorganize behaviors and brains in the cognitive state known as literacy. Here writing is analyzed as a tool used collectively and collaboratively. Collective, collaborative use enabled the tool to become increasingly effective at eliciting specific behavioral (...) and psychological responses. Collective, collaborative use also subjected the tool to the combined force of the individual variability represented by different user and material combinations over time. Combined variability influenced tool form toward features reflecting both the average behavioral, physiological, and psychological capacities of the tool-using community and points of maximal usability. The result offers a new model of creativity, one based not on the individual but on collective, collaborative use and incremental change in behaviors and brains, materially accumulated and redistributed between generations. The model presents aspects of human innovation that escape the individualistic model by focusing on ordinary tool-using behaviors and sustained use within social groups as the critical elements. (shrink)

Common sense has it that some of the greatest achievements that are to our credit are creative, whether artistic or otherwise. But standard theories of achievement and merit struggle to explain them, since the praiseworthiness of creative achievements isn’t grounded in effort, quality of will, disclosing the agent’s values, or even reasons-responsiveness. I argue that it’s distinctive of artistic or quasi-artistic creative activity that it is guided by what I call aspirational aims, which are formulated in terms of evaluative predicates (...) (like painting something “moving” or engineering something “nifty”) whose descriptive realizers are not known in advance. Aesthetic creativity itself fundamentally consists in perceiving or conceiving of some modification of raw material or a medium as promoting or constituting a novel way of realizing the aspirational aim. Creative achievements like poems and paintings are then to our credit in virtue of being exercises of spontaneity that disclose a deep layer of our selves that is manifest in active perception of affordances, showing that there is something beautiful about the way we experience the world, as a Sally Rooney character puts it. As with other creditworthy achievements, what makes them difficult is that simply trying won’t suffice to make success likely – but unlike in many other cases, neither will trying hard, since we have no direct volitional or rational control over perceptual spontaneity. (shrink)

Philosophical debates about AI creativity have largely relied on conceptual analysis, asking whether artificial systems satisfy predefined criteria such as novelty, value, or intentionality. I argue that this approach fails due to the absence of stable and universally accepted conditions for creativity, a concept that is normatively laden and socially situated. Rejecting the concept altogether is likewise inadequate, since creativity attributions to AI have real cultural, legal, and economic consequences. -/- In response, I propose an enhanced consensus (...) approach inspired by Amabile's Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT). Rather than attempting to define creativity in the abstract, this framework treats creativity as an attribution grounded in structured expert judgment. I outline methodological extensions designed for AI contexts, including expanded and transparent expert participation, bias-aware evaluation procedures, and revisability over time. The proposal does not aim to resolve whether AI is intrinsically creative, but to provide a procedural framework for adjudicating creativity claims under conditions of technological change. (shrink)

Can matter, things, nonhuman organisms, technologies, tools and machines, biota or institutions be seen as creative? How does such creativity reposition the visionary activities of humans? This article is an elaboration of such questions as well as an attempt at a partial response. It was written as an editorial for the special issue of the Digital Creativity journal that interrogates the conception of Post-Anthropocentric Creativity. However, the text below is a rather unconventional editorial. It does not attempt (...) to provide an overview of the issue’s theme but, instead, samples it via a particular example. The idea of the issue was to think about post-anthropocentricism by considering (1) agents, recipients and processes of creativity alongside with its (2) purpose, value, ethics and politics. This article addresses the first subtheme by puzzling at the paradoxes of “field learning” and picks at the second by considering the texture of “automated beauty”. Both of these parts use chess for an example. The narrative on chess is intermitted by a section “on creativity” that attempts to contextualize the case-based discussion in the wider context and to consider motivations and implications. (shrink)

The term "creative aging," in the broadest sense, describes an aging policy idea that focuses on highlighting the creativity of older adults in order to prepare individuals and communities to manage old age. Programs focus on the evolution of creativity over the lifespan and aim to provide meaningful participatory engagement, especially through the arts.

I argue for an account of creativity that unifies creative achievements in the arts, sciences, and other domains and identifies its characteristic value. This account draws upon case studies of creative work in both the arts and sciences to identify creativity as a kind of successful exploration. I argue that if creativity is properly understood in this way, then it is fundamentally a property of processes, something only agents can achieve, something that comes in degrees, subjectively novel, (...) and non-formulaic. As I develop the account, I show how it avoids challenges faced by other accounts of creativity, especially concerning creativity’s value. Hills and Bird (2018, 2019) have together argued that creativity is not necessarily valuable. My account challenges this view. If I am right that creativity is a kind of successful exploration, then creativity does have a characteristic value, specifically epistemic value. (shrink)

Math prospective teachers must be able to think creatively and solve problems. The study looked into preservice teachers’ creative thinking and problem-solving abilities in statistics. The investigation was guided by a correlational design in a public university in the Philippines. Stratified random sampling was used to select the 103 study participants from two teacher education programs. Through google forms, data were collected using Torrance et al. (2008)’s tests of creative thinking and researcher-made statistics problem test. The findings revealed that preservice (...) teachers have commendable creative thinking, particularly fluency, flexibility, and elaboration skills. Still, they lack problem-solving skills in statistics, specifically with central tendency, dispersion, and position measures. The correlational analysis revealed no link between creative thinking and problem-solving. Still, creative thinking and problem-solving courses are recommended to help preservice teachers develop their fundamental skills as mathematics educators. (shrink)

This chapter summarizes the conceptual foundations and research on emotional creativity. Emotional creativity is defined as a pattern of cognitive abilities and personality traits related to originality and appropriateness in emotional experience. This construct pervades human creative performance and represents an important link between emotional experience and cognitive processes. Empirical research in this field has revealed various links of emotional creativity to personality variables (e.g., openness to experience), positive affect, fantasy proneness, coping strategies, post-traumatic growth, better self-understanding, (...) and one’s engagement in practicing creative leisure activities. In the applied settings, emotional creativity has been found to be positively related to the intrinsic motivation of employees, the innovative performance of employees, teaching efficacy, and an increased awareness of professional roles. Interestingly, the available meta-analysis of past studies revealed that women showed significantly higher emotional creativity than men. Emotional creativity has also been found to be lower in older adulthood compared to younger age. Because the levels of emotional creativity were found to be sensitive to the decline of cognitive functions in older adults, their decrease can be considered as one of the indicators of cognitive aging. Recent research in clinical neuropsychology has also revealed that older adults in the early stages of Parkinson’s disease showed decreased emotional creativity compared to healthy older adults. (shrink)

In scientific communications, journal articles, and philosophical aesthetic debates the words “art”, “creativity”, and “machine” are put together more and more frequently. Since some machines are designed to, or happens to, imitate human artistic creativity, it seems natural to use the same words to talk about human artists and machines which imitate them. However, the evolution of language in light of technology may conceal specific features of the phenomena it is supposed to describe. This makes it difficult to (...) understand what machine creativity actually is and how it is connected to human creativity. The aim of the paper is to investigate why, and in what sense, the functioning of some machines may be described in terms of artistic creativity and what is the relation between machine creativity and its human archetype. I start (§1) by introducing some general ideas concerning how language evolves alongside new technologies and focusing on the case of machine creativity. In §2 I review how some creative machines have been presented to the public, thus showing that a linguistic habit which connects machines to artistic creativity has already formed. In §3 I survey the debate on machine aesthetics and I highlight the main traits of the issue. In §4 I submit a primary scheme of machine creativity which draws on the concept of functional autonomy. Finally (§5), I argue that machine creativity cannot be mistaken for a substitute of the human kind, despite the fact that the word is the same. Creative machines are technological mediums by which new forms of human aesthetic experience can be explored. The kind of creativity machines enjoy displays a functional nature. (shrink)

Whether Generative AI (GenAI) is creative is a question that has generated considerable philosophical debate yet remains unresolved. We argue that this impasse is not accidental but symptomatic of a wrong concep-tualization: The dominant question – is GenAI a creative agent? – presupposes that creativity is a property residing in a system. Instead, we propose to ask the question: what role does GenAI play as a medium of creative practice? This means that GenAI is neither a passive tool, nor (...) an autonomous system, but a tech-nology that actively structures the possibility space of creative expression. We propose five “dimensions of creativity” – modal, expressive, disruptive, reflexive, and integrated – understood as a process in which each dimension generates a tension that the next takes up and transforms. Applying this framework to GenAI, we show that the creative process itself changes under the new technical conditions GenAI introduces, and that the central risk is a drift toward pure reproduction – the collapse of creative practice into the recombination of what the medium has already mapped. We argue that resisting this drift requires bringing the medium to its own limits: making the technological conditions of creative practice visible and transparent, thereby transforming reproductivity back into creativity. (shrink)

This article offers a novel take on what philosophers have called problems of “practical underdetermination” in order to identify a form of creative epistemic agency operative in the means by which researchers cope with such problems. In developing my analysis, I contrast my “experimental dead-space” (EDS) formulation of practical underdetermination with the more standard “epistemic gap” formulation. Drawing on prior work, I embed the idea of an EDS within a broader unit of analysis—a “research platform”—and identify an experimental dead-space with (...) what I call, borrowing terms from Stuart Kauffman, an “epistemic adjacent possible.” This enables me to characterize the form of creativity I have in mind. Finally, I revisit the case study for which I originally formulated the idea of an EDS in order to show how my expanded analysis enables us to appreciate how research platforms in experimental science can creatively develop in genuinely novel, “unprestatable” ways. (shrink)

There is an underappreciated respect in which the widespread availability of generative artificial intelligence (AI) models poses a threat to human connection. My central contention is that human creativity is especially capable of helping us connect to others in a valuable way, but the widespread availability of generative AI models reduces our incentives to engage in various sorts of creative work in the arts and sciences. I argue that creative endeavors must be motivated by curiosity, and so they must (...) disclose the creative agent’s inquisitive self. It is through self-disclosure, including the disclosure of the inquisitive self, that we put ourselves in a position to be seen by and connect with others through our creative pursuits. Because relying on AI for certain generative tasks is less self-disclosive than the creative work such technologies supplant, this reliance threatens to weaken our connections to one another. (shrink)

Building on the writings of Wittgenstein on rule-following and deviance, Kristóf Nyíri advanced a theory of creativity as consisting in a fusion of conflicting rules or disciplines. Only such fusion can produce something that is both intrinsically new and yet capable of being apprehended by and passed on to a wider community. Creativity, on this view, involves not the breaking of rules, or the deliberate cultivation of deviant social habits, but rather the acceptance of enriched systems of rules, (...) the adherence to which presupposes simultaneous immersion in disciplines hitherto seen as being unrelated. The paper presents a demonstration of the fruitfulness of this theory by means of an account of some of the political, cultural and intellectual peculiarities of the Habsburg Monarchy. (shrink)

A growing literature has recognized the importance of mental simulation (e.g., imagining alternatives to reality) in sparking creativity. In this chapter, we examine how counterfactual thinking, or imagining alternatives to past outcomes, affects group creativity. We explore these effects by articulating a model that considers the influence of counterfactual thinking on both the cognitive and social processes known to impact group creative performance. With this framework, we aim to stimulate research on group creativity from a counterfactual perspective.

Introduction to the special issue in Pragmatics & Cognition focused on creativity, cognition, and material culture. With contributions from Maurice Bloch, Chris Gosden, Tim Ingold, John Kirsh, Carl Knappett & Sander van der Leeuw, Lambros Malafouris, Frédéric Vallée-Tourangeau, Kevin Warwick, and Tom Wynn and Frederick L. Coolidge.

This chapter focuses on the role of the imagination in creativity, using aphantasia as a case study. It first distinguishes between imagination and mental imagery, before giving an overview of what we know about aphantasia to date, focusing in particular on findings pertaining to creativity, imagination, and memory. It then turns to the role of the imagination in creativity, agreeing with philosophers that the imagination plays an essential role in creativity, which allows individuals to imagine a (...) multitude of possibilities. This view is then supplemented with a theory of the neuro-cognitive underpinnings of the imagination, whereby both the imagination and memory are supported by the same neural network – the default mode network. Finally, the chapter argues that this fuller picture allows us to understand the creative abilities of people with aphantasia, thoroughly resisting the thought that they might generally be unimaginative or uncreative. (shrink)

While creativity has long been regarded as a marvel of the human mind, recent research suggests that creativity is also embodied. However, theories of embodied creativity often remain cautious, upholding the traditional primacy of the mind and retaining internal representation as a core component of creative processes. This results in a “fragmented” state where various forms of bodily involvement are acknowledged, yet a cohesive framework to integrate them is absent. This paper aims to present a radical account (...) of embodied creativity, shifting the focus from grounding creativity in psychological mechanisms to “creativizing the body” through the lens of biological enactivism. It develops the concept of minimal creativity—free from conceptual or psychological influences—based on adaptive and autonomous biological mechanisms, which have played a crucial role in certain radical theories of embodied cognition. The paper then argues that human-level, mind-centered creativity is grounded in minimal biological creativity, as both are driven by the organism’s agential self-producing dynamics, with the “source of creativity” arising from regulatory responses to the far-from-equilibrium, unfinished states of the organizational whole. (shrink)

Building on findings that self-uncertainty motivates attempts to restore certainty about the self, particularly in ways that highlight one’s distinctiveness from others, we show that self-uncertainty, relative to uncertainty in general, increases creative generation among individualists. In Studies 1 to 3, high (but not low) individualists performed better on a creative generation task after being primed with self-uncertainty as opposed to general uncertainty. In Study 4, this effect emerged only among those who were told that the task measured creative as (...) opposed to analytical thinking, suggesting that the positive effects of self-uncertainty on performance are specific to tasks that bolster perceptions of uniqueness. In Study 5, self-uncertain individualists experienced a restoration of self-clarity after being induced to think about themselves as more (vs. less) creative. Implications for compensatory responses to self-uncertainty and factors that influence creativity are discussed. (shrink)

Creativity pervades human life. It is the mark of individuality, the vehicle of self-expression, and the engine of progress in every human endeavor. It also raises a wealth of neglected and yet evocative philosophical questions: What is the role of consciousness in the creative process? How does the audience for a work for art influence its creation? How can creativity emerge through childhood pretending? Do great works of literature give us insight into human nature? Can a computer program (...) really be creative? How do we define creativity in the first place? Is it a virtue? What is the difference between creativity in science and art? Can creativity be taught? The new essays that comprise The Philosophy of Creativity take up these and other key questions and, in doing so, illustrate the value of interdisciplinary exchange. Written by leading philosophers and psychologists involved in studying creativity, the essays integrate philosophical insights with empirical research. CONTENTS I. Introduction Introducing The Philosophy of Creativity Elliot Samuel Paul and Scott Barry Kaufman II. The Concept of Creativity 1. An Experiential Account of Creativity Bence Nanay III. Aesthetics & Philosophy of Art 2. Creativity and Insight Gregory Currie 3. The Creative Audience: Some Ways in which Readers, Viewers and/or Listeners Use their Imaginations to Engage Fictional Artworks Noël Carroll 4. The Products of Musical Creativity Christopher Peacocke IV. Ethics & Value Theory 5. Performing Oneself Owen Flanagan 6. Creativity as a Virtue of Character Matthew Kieran V. Philosophy of Mind & Cognitive Science 7. Creativity and Not So Dumb Luck Simon Blackburn 8. The Role of Imagination in Creativity Dustin Stokes 9. Creativity, Consciousness, and Free Will: Evidence from Psychology Experiments Roy F. Baumeister, Brandon J. Schmeichel, and C. Nathan DeWall 10. The Origins of Creativity Elizabeth Picciuto and Peter Carruthers 11. Creativity and Artificial Intelligence: a Contradiction in Terms? Margaret Boden VI. Philosophy of Science 12. Hierarchies of Creative Domains: Disciplinary Constraints on Blind-Variation and Selective-Retention Dean Keith Simonton VII. Philosophy of Education (& Education of Philosophy) 13. Educating for Creativity Berys Gaut 14. Philosophical Heuristics Alan Hájek. (shrink)

Descartes famously constructed a language test to determine the existence of other minds. The test made critical observations about how humans use language that purportedly distinguishes them from animals and machines. These observations were carried into the generative (and later biolinguistic) enterprise under what Chomsky in his Cartesian Linguistics, terms the “creative aspect of language use” (CALU). CALU refers to the stimulus-free, unbounded, yet appropriate use of language—a tripartite depiction whose function in biolinguistics is to highlight a species-specific form of (...) intellectual freedom. This paper argues that CALU provides a set of facts that have significant downstream effects on explanatory theory-construction. These include the internalist orientation of linguistics, the invocation of a competence-performance distinction, and the postulation of a generative language faculty that makes possible—but does not explain—CALU. It contrasts the biolinguistic approach to CALU with the recent wave of enthusiasm for the use of Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) as tools, models, or theories of human language, arguing that such uses neglect these fundamental insights to their detriment. It argues that, in the absence of replication, identification, or accounting of CALU, LLMs do not match the explanatory depth of the biolinguistic framework, thereby limiting their theoretical usefulness. (shrink)

Can large language models be considered intelligent? Arguments against this proposition often assume that genuine intelligence cannot exist without consciousness, understanding, or creative thinking. We discuss each of these roadblocks to machine intelligence and conclude that none of them rule out the possibility of viewing current AI systems based on large language models as intelligent. We argue that consciousness is not relevant for intelligence, while creativity and understanding should be considered functional traits that, in principle, can be implemented in (...) a machine. Many arguments concluding that current AI systems necessarily lack these traits either rely on human exceptionalism or flawed understanding of human intelligence. Arguments that highlight alleged shortcomings in current systems—such as a lack of reliability, agency, or understanding—often obscure the many qualitative similarities between human cognition and current AI models. We further suggest that a critical examination of high-performance AI systems can serve as a mirror through which we can reflect on our own intelligence. Many arguments against the prospects of AI may be based on naively optimistic assessments of capacities of the human mind. (shrink)

This paper develops a structural and phenomenological account of cognitive reintegration through recursive creative continuity formation. The originating observation arises from lived cognition in which small creative acts—such as arranging images, sequencing transitions, selecting music, constructing humorous narratives, combining symbols, modifying pacing, and repeatedly revising visual or conceptual structures—appeared to contribute to a much larger process of cognitive reorganisation over time. These activities were not initially experienced as formal cognitive rehabilitation or deliberate system construction. They were manageable, low-pressure forms of (...) creative engagement. However, repeated participation created increasingly stable relationships between image, sound, timing, memory, emotion, humour, identity, symbolism, and conceptual structure. The paper introduces recursive creative reconstruction as a Cognitive Branch concept describing how cognition may partially reintegrate itself through repeated creative acts that preserve enough continuity for further structure to become admissible. Under this account, creativity does not function only as expression. It can also operate as a recursive construction environment in which cognition re-enters disrupted continuity, experiments without catastrophic consequence, stabilises local relationships, preserves successful structures, introduces bounded variation, compresses repeated relations, and gradually develops larger navigable architectures. The paper integrates Continuity Empathy as a self-directed reconstruction method. The relevant question is not merely what a creative act produces, but: What continuity is cognition attempting to recover, protect, preserve, or extend through repeated return to this creative form? The paper examines continuity recovery, play, iterative layering, symbolic recombination, emotional organisation, narrative continuity, external creative artefacts, recursive compression, self-recognition, conceptual architecture, perfection pressure, overload, and the transition from fragmented experimentation to large-scale cognitive integration. It does not propose a neuroscientific mechanism, clinical treatment, or universal theory of creativity. Its contribution is structural, developmental, philosophical, and phenomenological. Its central proposition is: Recursive creativity may support cognitive reintegration when each low-stakes iteration preserves enough continuity for the next layer of structure to become admissible. (shrink)