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)

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)

Examining the complex role that motivation plays in creativity foregrounds the role of intrinsic motivation in paradigmatic cases of creative achievement. This is significant given the neglect of the role of motivation in the philosophical literature. Furthermore, given the way in which intrinsic motivation typically grounds and enables the cultivation of creativity for creatures like us, it pays to think of creativity in virtue-theoretic terms. As suggested by both empirical and conceptual considerations, intrinsic motivation insulates agents from (...) pressures against or inhibitors of creativity. It helps to explain robustness across different situations and influences. Conceiving of creativity as a virtue of character also makes best sense of how and why we praise or criticize as we do and shows us how to cultivate creativity. (shrink)

Artificial creativity is presented as a counter to Benjamin’s conception of an “aura” in art. Where Benjamin sees authenticity as art’s critical element, generative artificial intelligence operates as pure inauthenticity. Two elements of purely inauthentic art are described: elusiveness and reflection. Elusiveness is the inability to find an origin-story for the created artwork, and reflection is the ability for perceivers to impose any origin that serves their own purposes. The paper subsequently argues that these elements widen the scope of (...) artistic and creative potential. To illustrate, an example is developed around musical improvisation with an artificial intelligence partner. Finally, a question is raised about whether the inauthentic creativity of AI in art can be extended to human experience and our sense of our identities. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Generative artificial intelligence is transforming the way we make, and think about, art. With prompting from human users, these generative systems now produce aesthetically compelling and seemingly creative works in a variety of artistic domains. In doing so, they challenge the ways we think about artistic credit, about creativity, and about the mechanism of legal copyright, which is meant to protect and promote creativity in a capitalist art market. All of this is currently at play in the (...) courtroom, as artists contest the ways in which their artworks can be rightfully fed into these artificial systems (“the problem of the inputs”), and other artists are challenged over whether they might be credited for the visual images these systems generate (“the problem of the outputs”). Here, we explore these problems as they arise in visual art. We argue that the contested legal landscape surrounding these artificial systems reflects the ways they challenge our received notions of artistic credit and creativity. And we suggest that clarifying or changing the application of copyright in light of their generative capacities will ultimately involve revising our conception of art. (shrink)

We can formulate an argument against AI creativity from agency. By some accounts, creativity requires agency, and agency is, many think, not possible for AI. This is due to the typical conception of agency as a capacity for intentional action. Intentional action is thought to require mental states, a severe challenge for machine intelligence. On the face of things, the agency argument seems to provide a straightforward route to argue for the impossibility of AI creativity. However, this (...) path, I argue, is not so clear. In this paper, I outline the agency argument against AI creativity, before calling into question the apparent simplicity of this argument. I argue, ultimately, that the reasoning behind the inclusion of agency in accounts of creativity does not necessitate the use of intentional action, but can instead be satisfied by a minimal teleological account of agency. (shrink)

It aimed to identify the strategic creativity in Islamic banks in Palestine between reality and implementation. The study adopted the descriptive analytical approach. A questionnaire was designed as a tool for the study. The study community consisted of all employees in Islamic banks from the top and middle management and the study has been applied to the Palestinian Islamic bank and the Arab Islamic Bank. The comprehensive inventory method was used, given the small size of the study sample, as (...) questionnaires were distributed to (175) employees, and a number of (5) categories were chosen from each branch of the bank(general manager, deputy general manager, director Branch, department head, department manager). (164) questionnaires have been used Recovered with a recovery rate of (93.71%). The study showed a number of results, the most important of which is the availability of dimensions of strategic innovation at a high level in Islamic banks in Palestine with a relative weight of (82.22%). In addition, that there are no differences between the averages estimates about the reality of the study variables in Islamic banks due to (gender, age group, educational qualification, number of years of service, job title). The study also presented a set of recommendations, including that the bank should provide the environment and the appropriate climate for employees to invest their intellectual energy, urge them to strategic creativity, and deal fairly with all creative ideas regardless of their source. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of whether artificial systems can be considered creative in the absence of cognition. It advances a novel perspective by grounding the analysis on a foundational premise: generative AI systems, such as LLMs and GMIs, are non-cognitive. This distinction is established through the application of the Minimal Cognitive Grid (MCG), offering a more precise entry point into the creativity debate. Despite their non-cognitive nature, these systems produce outputs that meet standard criteria for creativity—novelty and (...) usefulness—and reproduce, in functional terms, the stages of human creative processes. A comparative analysis with the Wallas–Jaoui model supports this claim. However, the absence of intentionality and authenticity limits any attribution of genuine creativity. So, how can we define Artificial Creativity? To resolve this, the paper introduces a minimal definition of artificial creativity as a non-cognitive, non-intentional, and non-authentic generative mechanism. This is the first attempt to define the concept directly, rather than by exclusion. The definition clarifies the theoretical boundaries between natural and artificial creativity, avoids anthropocentric bias, and establishes a foundation for future research in computational creativity and philosophy of AI. (shrink)

Margaret Boden presents a series of essays in which she explores the nature of creativity in a wide range of art forms. Creativity is the generation of novel, surprising, and valuable ideas. Boden identifies three forms of creativity (combinational, exploratory, and transformational) each eliciting a different form of surprise.

Margaret Boden famously theorizes that the highest form of creativity is more than the production of new ideas—it involves the transformation of a conceptual space consisting of all possible ideas that a person can obtain. This article examines whether this notion of transformative creativity can be applied to the field of biology. Biological transformative creativity (BTC) is theoretically conceivable if an extension of Boden’s original framework is allowed to include non-conceptual spaces as the object of transformation. However, (...) identifying specific biological phenomena that warrant the label of transformative creativity in living systems poses a substantial challenge. After scrutinizing two recent theories regarding BTC—one connecting BTC to evolution and the other equaling it to self-organization—this paper turns to a third alternative hypothesis that emphasizes the autonomous, self-productive mechanisms through which novel organizational patterns and morphological features take shape. To unpack this idea, the paper draws on extensive evidence in epigenetic studies and argues that autonomous transformation of overall possibilities of living organisms occurs at the individual level primarily due to flexible modifications of gene expression norms in the organism. Then, the paper analyzes the developmental plasticity of _C. elegans_ and the origin and differentiation of castes in social insects as two examples of the epigenetic form of BTC. The account is expected to contribute to a more appropriate understanding of the origin of human creativity and the creative nature of life. (shrink)

The Turing Test is claimed by many to be a way to test for the presence, in computers, of such ``deep'' phenomena as thought and consciousness. Unfortunately, attempts to build computational systems able to pass TT have devolved into shallow symbol manipulation designed to, by hook or by crook, trick. The human creators of such systems know all too well that they have merely tried to fool those people who interact with their systems into believing that these systems really have (...) minds. And the problem is fundamental: the structure of the TT is such as to cultivate tricksters. A better test is one that insists on a certain restrictive epistemic relation between an artificial agent A, its output o, and the human architect H of A – a relation which, roughly speaking, obtains when H cannot account for how A produced o. We call this test the ``Lovelace Test'' in honor of Lady Lovelace, who believed that only when computers originate things should they be believed to have minds. (shrink)

This paper describes a theory that explains both the creativity and the efficiency of people's conceptual combination. In the constraint theory, conceptual combination is controlled by three constraints of diagnosticity, plausibility, and informativeness. The constraints derive from the pragmatics of communication as applied to compound phrases. The creativity of combination arises because the constraints can be satisfied in many different ways. The constraint theory yields an algorithmic model of the efficiency of combination. The C3 model admits the full (...) creativity of combination and yet efficiently settles on the best interpretation for a given phrase. The constraint theory explains many empirical regularities in conceptual combination, and makes various empirically verified predictions. In computer simulations of compound phrase interpretation, the C3 model has produced results in general agreement with people's responses to the same phrases. (shrink)

Virtue accounts of innovation ethics have recognized the virtue of creativity as an admirable trait in innovators. However, such accounts have not paid sufficient attention to the way creativity functions as a collective phenomenon. We propose a collective virtue account to supplement existing virtue accounts. We base our account on Kieran’s definition of creativity as a virtue and distinguish three components in it: creative output, mastery and intrinsic motivation. We argue that all of these components can meaningfully (...) be attributed to innovation groups. This means that we can also attribute the virtue of creativity to group agents involved in innovation. Recognizing creativity as a collective virtue in innovation is important because it allows for a more accurate evaluation of how successful innovation generally happens. The innovator who takes a collective virtue account of creativity seriously will give attention to the facilitation of an environment where the group can flourish collectively, rather than only nurturing the individual genius. (shrink)

Organizational leaders are eager to unlock the creative potential of followers. Yet, there is growing evidence that creativity can also have a dark side within organizations. Building on research linking creativity and unethical behavior, we develop the construct of creative unethicality—behavior that is both unethical and novel. We draw on social exchange theory to develop a model that identifies both why and when creative unethicality emerges within organizations. Specifically, we investigate the exchange dynamics through which creative support provided (...) by empowering leaders facilitates creative unethicality under conditions of high performance pressure. Across two multi-wave, multi-source field studies with employee-coworker and leader-subordinate dyads and an experimental study with a novel unethicality measure in a business simulation, we find convergent support for our theoretical model. These findings have important theoretical and practical implications for fostering creativity in organizations without simultaneously facilitating creative unethicality. (shrink)

Beginning with the prevalent idea that creativity is the ability to make or do things having valuable novelty, the paper explores a variety of axiological and novelty conditions and defends an instrumental success condition. I discuss Robert K. Merton's distinction between 'originality' and 'priority', and Margaret Boden's similar distinction between historical and psychological creativity, as well as Thomas Reid's and Bruce Vermazen's remarks on relations between novelty and value.

We can formulate an argument against AI creativity from agency. By some accounts, creativity requires agency, and agency is, many think, not possible for AI. This is due to the typical conception of agency as a capacity for intentional action. Intentional action is thought to require mental states, a severe challenge for machine intelligence. On the face of things, the agency argument seems to provide a straightforward route to argue for the impossibility of AI creativity. However, this (...) path, I argue, is not so clear. In this paper, I outline the agency argument against AI creativity, before calling into question the apparent simplicity of this argument. I argue, ultimately, that the reasoning behind the inclusion of agency in accounts of creativity does not necessitate the use of intentional action, but can instead be satisfied by a minimal teleological account of agency. (shrink)

There is no prepared script for social and cultural life. People work it out as they go along. Creativity and Cultural Improvisation casts fresh, anthropological eyes on the cultural sites of creativity that form part of our social matrix. The book explores the ways creative agency is attributed in the graphic and performing arts and in intellectual property law. It shows how the sources of creativity are embedded in social, political and religious institutions, examines the relation between (...) creativity and the perception and passage of time, and reviews the creativity and improvisational quality of anthropological scholarship itself. Individual essays examine how the concept of creativity has changed in the history of modern social theory, and question its applicability as a term of cross-cultural analysis. The contributors highlight the collaborative and political dimensions of creativity and thus challenge the idea that creativity arises only from individual talent and expression. (shrink)

This paper explores the intersection of art history and AI technology. Special attention is paid to Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), a machine learning technology widely used in AI art. This technology is particularly interesting to art history and the philosophy of art because it raises enduring questions about the creative process of artmaking, especially what constitutes a new and original work of art. While this is a relatively new area, it is possible to discern emerging directions where art and AI (...) intersect. One pressing issue concerns the use (or misuse) of algorithmically enabled technologies and datasets to perpetuate longstanding art-historical biases. The critical position adopted in this paper shares this concern. I examine a notable example of GAN technology that claims to create original art styles. While such experiments in computational creativity are technically interesting, their artistic aims can be questionable. I argue a mechanical model of artistic development based solely on the autonomy of style is problematic for at least two reasons: 1) it uncritically reinstates a formalist view of art history; 2) it recreates a narrow style-centric ‘historical modernism.’ However, despite voicing these reservations, I also discuss the potential of this technology to engage with topics of critical relevance to art history and the philosophy of art. (shrink)

This is the second of a two-part essay on the history of debates concerning the creativity of natural selection, from Darwin through the evolutionary synthesis and up to the present. In the first part, I focussed on the mid-late nineteenth century to the early twentieth, with special emphasis on early Darwinism and its critics, the self-styled “mutationists.” The second part focuses on the evolutionary synthesis and some of its critics, especially the “neutralists” and “neo-mutationists.” Like Stephen Gould, I consider (...) the creativity of natural selection to be a key component of what has traditionally counted as “Darwinism.” I argue that the creativity of natural selection is best understood in terms of selection initiating evolutionary change, and selection directing evolutionary change, for example by creating the variation that it subsequently acts upon. I consider the respects in which both of these claims sound non-Darwinian, even though they have long been understood by supporters and critics alike to be virtually constitutive of Darwinism. (shrink)

The object of this research is the current cultural situation of post-truth, which is associated with the crisis of factuality and objectivity and is formed in the context of postmodern relativization of the substantive foundations of culture. The subject of this research is post-artistry as a recent cultural phenomenon that emerges in the era of post-truth and is caused by the virtualization, digitalization, and simulacrisation of various cultural forms. The aim of this research is to identify the essential characteristics and (...) mechanisms of post-truth functioning in various spheres of socio-cultural being, as well as to provide a conceptual basis for the phenomenon of post-artistry as a product of the era of post-truth and postmetaphysical philosophy. The research methodology includes comparative analysis, the dialectical method, system analysis, agent-based modeling, and phenomenological and hermeneutical approaches. The scientific novelty of this research lies in identifying the ways of conceptualizing the phenomenon of post-artistry, which include literal, transformational, postmodern, postcultural, voluntaristic, ideological, and digital interpretations, as well as in clarifying the meaning of the phenomena of pseudo-artistry, quasi-artistry, para-artistry, meta-artistry, creativity, neuro-artistry and form-artistry. The paper highlights and describes the «post-ontological» and «post-epistemological» problems of postmetaphysics, the first of which is associated with the reduction of objective reality to the hyperreality of simulacra, which is undergoing digitalization, which leads to a tripling of reality and the formation of postreality as a sphere of escapist existence of the subject, and the second is manifested in the processes of relativization, democratization, pluralization and egalitarization of truth, which are intensifying in the context of the information pandemic. The research also presents the specific features and mechanisms of post-truth in the socio-political, news, and advertising spheres. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that culture plays a pivotal role for understanding Nietzsche’s own normative commitments. My argument develops as follows: Section 2 shows that Nietzsche advances an ideal of self-cultivation (Bildung) which is derived from the existential role of culture, elevating a peculiar concept of artistic creativity to ground his perfectionist understanding of value. Section 3 traces Nietzsche’s image of Goethe as exemplar of creative excellence. I contend that Nietzsche portrays Goethe as a male genius, rendering his (...) concept of self-cultivation entrenched in the cultural imagery of his time. The fin de siècle was obsessed with the image of genius as well as the relationship of creativity and gender. Moreover, as towering figure of German culture after the founding of the German Empire in 1871, Goethe was a frequent example of creative genius. Section 4 deepens the discussion of the role of gender in Nietzsche’s concept of creativity, exploring how the essentialist gender psychology of his mature works curtails the creative potential of women and explains his dismissal of feminism. (shrink)

Currie (2019) has introduced a novel account of creativity within the social epistemology of science. The account is intended to capture how conservatism can be detrimental to the health of inquiry within certain scientific communities, given the aims of research there. I argue that recent remarks by Rovelli (2018) put pressure on the applicability of the account. Altogether, it seems we do not yet well understand the relationship between creativity, conservatism, and the health of inquiry in science.

According to one of the rivals, “poets do not create from knowledge but on the basis of certain natural talents and guided by divine inspiration, just like seers and the singers of oracles.”1 There is “a form of possession and madness, caused by the muses, that seizes a tender and untouched soul and inspires and stimulates it so that it educates by praising the deeds of ancestors in songs and in every other mode of poetry. Whoever knocks on the door (...) of poetry without the madness of the muses trusting that technique alone will make him a whole poet does not reach his aim; he and his poetry of reason disappear before the poetry of the madman.”2 Even knowledge cannot arise in a purely rational way. In his seventh letter Plato explains how “from a long and dedicated pursuit of the subject and from close companionship, [understanding] suddenly, like fire being kindled by a leaping spark, is born in the soul and straightaway finds nourishment in itself.”3 Thus understanding or building a work of art contains an element that goes beyond skill, technical knowledge, and talent. A new force takes hold of the soul and directs it, toward theoretical insight in one case, toward artistic achievement in the other.The view adumbrated in these quotations is very popular today. Interestingly enough it seems to receive support form the most rigorous and most advanced parts of the sciences. This rigor, it is pointed out, is but a transitory stage in a process which has much in common with what Plato envisaged. Of course, it is necessary to make some changes: Plato’s knowledge was stable while scientific knowledge progresses. Plato assumed that outside forces—madness, divine inspiration—impinge on the soul while the moderns let the appropriate ideas, images, emotions arise from the individual soul itself. But there seem to exist many reasons to recommend a Platonism that has been modified in this way.In the following essay I shall try to show that the reasons that have been given are invalid and that the view itself—the view that culture needs individual creativity—is not only absurd but also dangerous. To make my criticism as concrete as possible I shall concentrate on e specific group of arguments in its favor. And to make it as clear as possible I shall use arguments trying to show the role of individual creativity in the sciences. If these clear and detailed arguments fail, then the rhetoric emerging from more foggy areas will altogether lose its force. 1. Plato, Apology of Socrates 22c. Translations, unless otherwise noted, are my own2. Plato, Phaedrus 245a.3. Plato, Epistles 341c, d. Paul Feyerabend studied singing and opera production in Vienna, history of theater and theatrical production at the Institute for the Methodological Reform of the German Theater in Weimar, and physics, astronomy, and philosophy in Vienna. He has lectured on aesthetics, the history of science, and philosophy in Austria, Germany, England, New Zealand, and the United States. At the moment he holds a joint appointment at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. His books include Against Method , Erkenntnis für freie Menschen , and Philosophical Papers . Forthcoming works are Farewell to Reason and Stereotypes of Reality. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to contribute to responsible innovation by developing a conceptual framework for the processes of creativity and innovation. The hypothesis is that creative and innovative processes are similar in that both are affective in nature. I develop this conceptual framework through an interpretation of the insights of Henri Poincaré’s notion of the ‘four stages’ in the creative process and Joseph Schumpeter’s notion of the entrepreneur. Building on this framework, I analyze the creative and innovative (...) practices of the film director Lars von Trier and the entrepreneur Steve Jobs. The interpretation and analysis suggest that the processes of creativity and innovation are similar in nature in that both are based on the moods of disturbance and enthusiasm; but that they differ in that creativity is based on the feelings of interest and irritation, whereas innovation is based on the feelings of desire and anger. In the conclusion I discuss the implications of this for responsible innovation with regard to the social aspect of resistance towards innovation and the ethical aspects of anger in entrepreneurial leadership. (shrink)

In this article, I introduce the concept of interpretational creativity (IC), a form of creativity in human artistic activity that has been neglected by discussions of AI creativity. IC, which I describe in relation to Persian traditional music and a few more art traditions, involves creating a new artwork that exhibits a novel relationship to a body of traditional content. Because IC is different from and orthogonal to other forms of creativity, specifically those discussed by Margaret (...) A. Boden in relation to AI, I offer a new analysis of the capacity of generative AI systems to exhibit IC. Based on a technical understanding of how dominant generative AI models learn to produce artistic products, I argue that IC poses an acute challenge related to the need to master extensive cultural context and relationships that are not always descriptively articulable. Regarding the implications of my arguments for the broader problem of AI creativity, I argue that although that challenge can be considered as related to processing contextual information by AI systems, the problem, at a deeper level, concerns the lack of a capacity in AI to adopt a value-laden, cultural, and perspectival stance and to reflect on a tradition. (shrink)

This paper explores how adaptive creativity is continuously generated and sustained in living systems. The philosophical frame and motivations for this investigation will be introduced by juxtaposing an actual creative process with current cybernetic efforts to automate creativity. Past and present process philosophers that have critiqued the implicit commitments of these contemporary techniques will set the stage for further investigations. The litmus test of progress in this investigation will be measured against the extension of two concepts: virtuality, as (...) introduced by Gilbert Simondon (On the Mode of the Existence of Technical Objects), and relevant noise, as introduced by Bacigalupi (“Semiogenesis: A Dynamic System Approach to Agency and Structure”). To refine the concepts of virtuality and relevant noise for our purposes, a rigorous theoretical model will be proposed whose intent is to explain veritable unbounded creativity. This model will then serve as a heuristic lens to explore additional extant models, such as the Kuramoto model (Strogatz), that are used to explain empirical observations of adaptive and creative behaviors in a diversity of biological phenomena. Based on these models of biological creativity and the critique of the contemporary cybernetic project, this paper will conclude by outlining the ethical implications of our culture’s current commitments to a cybernetic world view and how we might evolve beyond it. (shrink)

In this paper I take a philosophy of technology approach to so-called “creative AI.” In light of the disruptions promised by generative AI systems, I explore the way AI may give cause to develop a philosophical concept of creativity for the new technological milieu, beyond those often found in AI models, based on human psychology alone. Largely framed by the process thought of Alfred Whitehead, the paper first engages in a critique of human-centric accounts of creativity that are (...) dominant in the AI field, and then explores the way a process philosophy of technology can describe emerging creativity-technology relationships. The conclusion of the paper is twofold: the first is that creative AI systems should embrace a more contingent and complex concept of creativity in order to produce “new, surprising, and valuable” objects in the world. The second is that one of the key roles of contemporary philosophy of technology is to rethink creativity as artificial in light of the potential of AI. (shrink)

The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic has brought about unprecedented uncertainty and challenges to the worldwide economy and people’s everyday life. Anecdotal and scientific evidence has documented the existence of a positive relationship between the experience of crisis and creativity. Though this appears to be ubiquitous, the crisis-creativity-well-being relationship has not been sufficiently examined across countries and using a working adult sample. The current study drew on a sample consisting of 1,420 employees from China, Germany, and the United States (...) to examine whether creativity can function as an effective means to cope with crisis and to achieve both flourishing and social well-being. Multivariate analyses showed that perceived impact of COVID-19 was positively related to creative process engagement, which was positively related to employees’ self-reported creative growth. Creative growth was associated with a higher level of flourishing well-being. This sequential mediation model was significant across the three samples. Creativity also mediated the relationship between perceived impact of COVID-19 and social well-being, but this connection was only found for the Chinese sample. Further data analyses revealed that individualism moderated this serial mediation model in that the positive coping effect of creativity on both flourishing and social well-being was stronger for individuals who hold more collectivistic views. Results of the study have implications for crisis management, personal development, and positive functioning of individuals and society. (shrink)

TA builds on the state of mind (SoM) framework to offer the novelty-seeking model (NSM). The model relates curiosity to creativity but this commentary focuses on creativity: (i) It assesses the SoM + NSM model of creativity-in-the-lab, showing that the focus on semantic networks is inadequate. (ii) It discusses architectural design to sketch ideas for a theory of “big C” creativity.

The medium of film is used for a wide range of purposes – not only for art and entertainment, but as a tool of information dissemination, scientific enquiry, advertising, and political campaigning. While having received most attention in the context of film art, imagination and creativity are relevant to the use of film for all these purposes, because both are ubiquitously relevant to purposeful behavior and problem-solving cognition across all domains of human activity. Various modes of imagining (propositional, sensory-experiential, (...) and empathic), along with the relationship between imagination and creativity, different types of creativity, and the importance of constraints and problems in spurring creative agency, are explored in the light of their pertinence to film. The distinction and the symbiotic relationship between creative and recreative imagining are outlined. The dynamic, embedded, and extended nature of the creative imagination in the context of filmmaking is limned, and an argument concerning the authentic mark of the creative presented. (shrink)

This article suggests that artworks can capture the ambiguity and ambivalence of grief, accommodating complex emotions from the artist’s lived experience without the need to resolve or rationalize them. Focusing on visual artist Helen Acklam, it explores how creative activities give expression to the atemporal and uncanny aspects of grief, in which the dead are felt to be both present and absent, beloved and abject. In cases of disenfranchised grief, artworks also provide a means to rewrite the narrative of a (...) death and have grief socially acknowledged. My article thus supports Thomas Fuchs’s observation that ambiguity is central in grief. However, whereas he focuses on how ambiguity is resolved, I emphasize how it can be accommodated and communicated through creativity and art. Through attention to the art object, we can enter into the griever’s experience. Art in this way allows for a particularly vivid and experiential form of witnessing. (shrink)

This paper endeavors to investigate how we can understand creativity concerning computation by rearticulating imagination in artistic practices. Drawing on Yuk Hui’s concept of artificial imagination and Bernard Stiegler’s thinking on organology, the paper uses the Choi Hung Estate project as a case study demonstrating the potential of Gaussian splatting as a supplement for the imagination in producing dynamic, interactive digital artworks that open the path for conceiving collective memories. By thinking of creativity and beyond computation, the paper (...) unpacks the possibilities for re-grounding the philosophical foundation of Gaussian splatting from an organological perspective. (shrink)

Purpose This study aims to test whether artists and technologists evaluate artificial intelligence (AI)-generated art differently with respect to authorship, ownership, ethics, public perception and market impact, thereby clarifying how creative and technical stakeholders view emerging copyright and pricing debates. Design/methodology/approach A closed-ended questionnaire using five-point Likert items was administered to 119 master-level artists and 119 AI developers in India. Paired-sample t-tests compared the two groups across six constructs derived from the recent literature. Findings Authorship and market-impact scores did not (...) differ significantly (p = 0.229; p = 0.168). However, large gaps emerged for ownership (Δ = 1.02; t = 15.31; p < 0.001) and public perception (Δ = 1.24; t = 11.25; p < 0.001). Artists favored limited copyright and lower prices for AI art, whereas technologists endorsed full protection and price parity under defined conditions. Both groups supported minimal yet dedicated regulation. Research limitations/implications Findings are based on self-reported perceptions from a single country; cross-cultural replication is needed. Practical implications Results inform policymakers drafting adaptive copyright frameworks and gallery curators setting valuation benchmarks for AI-generated art. Social implications Balanced regulation and weighted authorship could preserve human creativity while legitimizing algorithmic contributions. Originality/value This is the first paired statistical investigation that juxtaposes creative practitioners and AI developers, quantifies their attitudinal distance and links the results to the legal triad of fixation, originality and creativity. The Global South sample broadens a debate dominated by Western case studies. (shrink)

Both scientific evidence and folklore have suggested that madness is associated with creativity, especially in the arts. Recently, more rigorous studies have confirmed to some extent these previous observations. The current view is that it is not severe and acute insanity that is related to heightened creativity, but the personality roots and soft manifestations of both schizophrenic and bipolar psychoses. The affective and cognitive peculiarities associated with schizotypic and hypomanic personalities may be preferentially related to different kinds of (...) creative endeavours, such as the sciences and arts, respectively. The connection between personality traits and creativity is produced because they share some biological-cognitive-personality features, such as cognitive disinhibition. Additionally, it has been shown that the genetic liability for both bipolar and schizophrenic psychoses is related to creativity. A prevailing hypothesis is that creativity may be one type of 'compensatory advantage' for those carrying the genes for psychosis. (shrink)

Though active in the arts herself, Dr. Richards (psychology, Saybrook Graduate School, San Francisco; psychiatry, Harvard Medical School; McLean Hospital, Belmont, Massachusetts) views creativity more broadly and as essential to survival. As someone who helped break new ground in the assessment of creativity in the general population, she introduces 13 chapters in which interdisciplinary thinkers probe the "originality of everyday life" in individual and societal contexts. Perspectives range from Piaget's developmental stages and the more positive aspects of television (...) viewing to chaos theory and Zen Buddhism. In integrating these views, the editor enumerates the benefits of living creatively. (shrink)

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)

Algorithms and automated learning systems have been successfully applied to produce images, pieces of music, or texts that are appealing to humans and that are often compared to artworks. Computational technologies are able to find surprising and original solutions–new patterns that humans cannot anticipate– but does this mean we ascribe to them the kind of creativity that is expressed by human artists? Even though AI can successfully detect humans’ preferences as well as select the objects that satisfy taste, can (...) we ascribe to them the capacity of recognizing the intrinsic value of artworks? To answer these questions, I am first going to explain the kind of creativity that is expressed by contemporary predictive systems, then, in the second part of this paper, I will try to show the difference between the creativity of algorithms and the creativity of artists by expanding on Deleuze’s reflections. (shrink)

While one version of belief in inspiration, for which the inspired human passively receives inspired deliverances, precludes human creativity, another, for which inspired compositions reflect human agency and ingenuity, presupposes it. Margaret Boden, however, suggests (in The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms (2004)) that creativity is continuous with generic human powers, and also arises through infringing recognised rules. While the former suggestion (about continuity) is argued to be readily acceptable, problems are raised for the rule-breaking account of (...) class='Hi'>creativity. Accounts of creativity need to be supplemented with awareness that creativity commonly involves participation in traditions of skill or craftsmanship, and in a creative community, whether rules are broken or not. Further, the continuity approach is argued to be consistent with at least one particular variant of belief in inspiration, according to which God, as the universal Creator, can communicate through the imagination of receptive minds that reflect his/her creative imagination, as suggested by Austin Farrer in ‘Inspiration: Poetical and Divine’ (1963). Other faculties as well as the imagination are held to be involved, in a manner consistent with the continuity approach: perception, memory, reflectiveness, historical awareness and artistic ingenuity. (shrink)

Computer science only became established as a field in the 1950s, growing out of theoretical and practical research begun in the previous two decades. The field has exhibited immense creativity, ranging from innovative hardware such as the early mainframes to software breakthroughs such as programming languages and the Internet. Martin Gardner worried that "it would be a sad day if human beings, adjusting to the Computer Revolution, became so intellectually lazy that they lost their power of creative thinking" (Gardner, (...) 1978, p. vi-viii). On the contrary, computers and the theory of computation have provided great opportunities for creative work. This chapter examines several key aspects of creativity in computer science, beginning with the question of how problems arise in computer science. We then discuss the use of analogies in solving key problems in the history of computer science. Our discussion in these sections is based on historical examples, but the following sections discuss the nature of creativity using information from a contemporary source, a set of interviews with practicing computer scientists collected by the Association of Computing Machinery’s on-line student magazine, Crossroads. We then provide a general comparison of creativity in computer science and in the natural sciences. (shrink)

One of the most yet unresolved theoretical problems in creative thinking concerns the relation between creativity and aesthetics. Standard models of aesthetics rarely offer a functional naturalistic explanation that integrates these two notions within a single framework. As a result, aesthetics and creativity remain paradoxically intertwined yet conceptually disconnected, developing as research fields with limited cross-theoretical engagement. The paper approaches the problem from a non-art-related perspective, grounded in a fundamentally different metaphysical framework. In explaining how explorations towards novel (...) and appropriate ideas aim at significant changes in knowledge constructions, the relation between aesthetics and creativity must necessarily be grounded in learning and development. However, we argue that standard models of the modular aesthetic mind face critical limitations in incorporating learning and development, thereby, failing to account for genuine knowledge transformation in creative explorations. As an alternative, we propose an Interactivist-Constructivist model of Aesthetics, which overcomes these limitations. Our claim is that a value-rich aesthetic sense of future interaction states is not only functionally integrated with learning and development but also actively shapes ideation paths within creative explorations. This aesthetic sense is both enabled by and facilitates further learning and development. Rather than existing as an isolated aspect of creative thinking, aesthetics are intrinsically embedded in the knowing ontology serving functional role: to reduce uncertainty in creative explorations, thus indicating and opening the door to new creative ideas and opportunities of further interaction. (shrink)

Digital technological innovation is reshaping the pattern of industrial development. Due to the shortage of digital talents and the frequent mobility of these people, the competition for talents will be very fierce for organizations to realize digital transformation. The digitization transformation of China’s service industry is far ahead of that of industry and agriculture. It is of great significance to study the organizational management and talent management of service enterprises to reduce the negative impact of insufficient talent reserve and meet (...) the needs of digital development. Based on 378 valid questionnaires from China’s service industry, this paper applied polynomial regression and a response surface model to analyze the impact of two kinds of person-environment fit on work engagement and individual creativity. The results show that: under the combination of high morality and high talent, work engagement and individual creativity are the highest; individual creativity is stronger under the condition of high morality and low talent than under low morality and high talent; and work engagement mediates the influence of morality and talent on individual creativity. The research reveals the internal mechanism by which morality and talent cooperatively promote individual creativity, which provides theoretical guidance for management practice of service firms to improve individual creativity in the process of digital transformation. (shrink)