The complexity and challenges of the external environment accelerate the awakening of the new generation of enterprise employees’ self-consciousness. Facing the continuous expansion of the information-based work mode, the traditional management mechanism of enterprises has a more limited impact on employee performance. Based on the goal-oriented theory, developing and excavating the creative personality traits of employees, making full use of goal-oriented behavior to improve their own innovation performance management path, are expected to become a new path to continuously (...) enhance the innovation ability of enterprises. In this study, we take the employees of high-tech enterprises as samples to explore the influence mechanism of creative personality traits, goal orientation and employee innovation performance. The results show that goal orientation significantly moderates the relationship between creative personality traits and innovation performance. The mediating effects of learning goal orientation, performance certification orientation, and performance avoidance orientation are all significant. (shrink)

The ability to be creative is often considered a unique characteristic of conscious beings and many efforts have been directed at demonstrating a relationship between creativity and the personality construct of psychoticism. The present study sought to investigate this link explicitly by focusing on discrete facets of creative cognition, namely the originality/novelty dimension and the practicality/usefulness dimension. Based on Eysenck’s conceptualisation of psychoticism as being characterised by an overinclusive cognitive style, it was expected that higher levels (...) of psychoticism would accompany a greater degree of conceptual expansion and elevated levels of originality in creative imagery, but would be unrelated to the practicality/usefulness of an idea. These hypotheses were confirmed in 80 healthy participants who were contrasted based on their EPQ psychoticism scale scores. Our findings suggest that the link between psychoticism and creativity is based on associative thinking and broader but weak top-down activation patterns rather than on goal-related thinking. (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)

Miscreants, in the form of deviants and dark personalities, impact organizations more than we realize. Most management instruction on ethics issues focuses on helping students to understand how to evaluate difficult situations, make ethical decisions, and engage in ethical actions. While this approach works well for the individual decision maker, it fails to help students learn how to anticipate and proactively prevent the unethical actions of others. Using ethical codes as a backdrop, “Thinking Like a Bad Guy” is a provocative (...) classroom activity to elicit critical and creative thinking among business students. The goal of this exercise is to facilitate student learning so they can anticipate the behaviors of bad actors and alter organizational processes and procedures to mitigate the ability of others to violate organizational ethical standards. (shrink)

According to Mednick’s (1962) theory of individual differences in creativity, creative individuals appear to have a richer and more flexible associative network than less creative individuals. Thus, creative individuals are characterized by “flat” (broader associations) instead of “steep” (few, common associations) associational hierarchies. To study these differences, we implement a novel computational approach to the study of semantic networks, through the analysis of free associations. The core notion of our method is that concepts in the network are (...) related to each other by their association correlations - overlap of similar associative responses (“association clouds”). We began by collecting a large sample of participants who underwent several creativity measurements and used a decision tree approach to divide the sample into low and high creative groups. Next, each group underwent a free association generation paradigm which allowed us to construct and analyze the semantic networks of both groups. Comparison of the semantic memory networks of persons with low creative ability and persons with high creative ability revealed differences between the two networks. The semantic memory network of persons with low creative ability seems to be more rigid, compared to the network of persons with high creative ability, in the sense that it is more spread out and breaks apart into more sub-parts. We discuss how our findings are in accord and extend Mednick’s (1962) theory and the feasibility of using network science paradigms to investigate high level cognition. (shrink)

In a well-known paper “Illusion and well-being”, Taylor and Brown maintain that positive illusions about the self play a significant role in the maintenance of mental health, as well as in the ability to maintain caring inter-personal relations and a sense of well-being. These illusions include unrealistically positive self-evaluations, exaggerated perceptions of personal control, and unrealistic optimism about one's future. Accurate self-knowledge, they maintain, is not an indispensable ingredient of mental health and well-being. Two lines of criticism are directed (...) against the creative self-deception hypothesis, one methodological and one substantive. First, it is argued that Taylor and Brown's method of eliciting experimental subjects' self-reports and comparative self-ratings under artificial experimental conditions lacks ecological validity and phenomenological realism. Second, it is argued that positive illusions diminish the range of reactive other-regarding attitudes and emotions that people can adopt. A literary case history (Ibsen's The wild duck ) which satisfies the criteria of ecological adequacy is used to illustrate the latter point. (shrink)

Emotional creativity refers to a set of cognitive abilities and personality traits related to the originality of emotional experience and expression. Previous studies have found that emotional creativity can positively predict posttraumatic growth and mental health. The outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has posed great challenges to people’s daily lives and their mental health status. Therefore, this study aims to address the following two questions: whether emotional creativity can improve posttraumatic growth and mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic (...) and how it works. To do this, a multiple mediation model has been proposed, which supposes that emotional creativity is associated with posttraumatic growth and mental health through perceived social support and regulatory emotional self-efficacy. The study involved 423 participants from multiple regions with different COVID-19 involvement levels. Participants were asked to complete a questionnaire with six parts, which included Emotional Creativity Inventory (ECI), Regulatory Emotional Self-Efficacy Scale (RES), Stress-Related Growth Scale-Short Form (SRGS-SF), Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support scale (MSPSS), Brief Symptom Inventory-18 scale (BSI-18), and COVID-19-related life events questionnaire. Path analysis used to examine the mediation model indicated that under the control of COVID-19-related life events and age, perceived social support mediated a positive association between emotional creativity and posttraumatic growth as well as a negative association between emotional creativity and all mental health problems, including somatization, depression, and anxiety. Regulatory emotional self-efficacy mediates the association between emotional creativity and posttraumatic growth, emotional creativity and anxiety, and emotional creativity and depression. The results suggest that emotional creativity plays an important role in coping with stressful events related to COVID-19. Furthermore, these results might provide a better understanding of the possible paths through which emotional creativity is related to psychological outcomes, such as mental health and posttraumatic growth. (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)

Purpose of the articleThe presented study introduces the psychological factors which influence the creative development of young people in their families, especially from psychological position - acquired of birh of order - point of view. The study presents basic theoretical theses of birth orders´concept, as A. Adler and his followers introduced into psychological literature; it also brings information from empirical researches about the groups of five positions´ birth order: first-born, send-born, middle-born, youngest and parents´only children in relation to their (...) psychological characteristics. The second part is dedicated to issue of birth order in relation to creativity, intelligence and personality traits of 153 adolescents - students of the last year of high school who passed the exams for the artistic - technical study at the Faculty of Architecture with the average age 18.32 years. Methodology/methods The creativity was identified by Urban’s Test of Creative Thinking and Torrance Test of Creative Thinking. The intelligence was identified by the nonverbal Test of General Abilities. The Slovak version of NEO FFI Inventory was used for the measuring of five personality dimensions. The anamnestic data were obtained from our Questionnaire of the Family Constellation. The results were statistically processed by means of ANOVA SPSS program. The inter-group differences based on the birth-order were tested by the one-way ANOVA method as well as two-way analysis by ANOVA method and by T-test. Scientific aim The aim of the study was to find out in what kind of families live the gifted students, what are intersexual differences in creativity, intelligence, personality traits and in what birth order live the gifted adolescents, what are their typical personality traits and also the specifics of their creativity and the level of intelligence. Findings The research results on the sample of 153 adolescents showed that higher performances in the fluency and flexibility of thinking in the Torrance Creativity Test showed the women in comparison to men. The results indicate that the birth order differentiates the groups of gifted adolescents in the personality dimension openness to experience and agreeableness. Highly creative adolescents have ascribed themselves more often characteristics connected with creativity.The findings are comented as to the implications for the role of the creativity in both sexes and for the composition research sample and for research methods too. The other findings dealing with the specifics of creativity will be more broadly discussed in the study. (shrink)

Third language learners have great potential in developing creativity; however, the factors affecting L3 learners’ creativity have received little attention. This study investigated the relationships between proactive personality, three different thinking patterns, and creativity among L3 learners. The participants were 220 Chinese students who attended an obligatory L3 course in college. The results showed that proactive personality, growth mindset, golden mean thinking, and creativity had significant intercorrelations. Moreover, the role of growth mindset and golden mean thinking as mediators (...) of the proactive personality and creativity relation was supported, and the mediating effect of growth mindset was larger than that of golden mean thinking. However, the fixed mindset did not show a significant indirect effect on the path from proactive personality to creativity. This is the first research to treat growth mindset, fixed mindset, and golden mean thinking as mediating variables on the path from proactive personality to creativity, particularly demonstrating that golden mean thinking, which is specific to Asian students and located midway between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset, can cultivate creativity. Some suggestions for fostering creativity in L3 students were also included in this study. (shrink)

Emotional creativity refers to cognitive abilities and personality traits related to the originality of emotional experience and expression. Previous studies have found that the COVID-19 epidemic and the restrictions imposed increased the levels of negative emotions, which obstructed adaptation. This research suggests that EC predicts the motivation for innovative adaptive behavior under the restrictions of COVID-19. In the case study of university professors, we show that EC predicts the motivation to creatively capitalize on the imposed online teaching in looking (...) for innovative research and personal development. Methodologically, we rely on the Emotional Creativity Inventory administered to a sample of 463 university professors from the Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, and Russia. The indicators for motivation for innovative performance included motivations to use distant methods of scientific research, to look for partners for conducting scientific research in other cities or abroad, to conduct interdisciplinary research, starting distance learning to enhance qualifications, and the perception that due to online teaching, there is more time for personal development. We employ a set of ordinal regression analyses controlling for age, gender, position, type of science, and country. The results suggest that Emotional Creativity and its three components predict the motivation of university professors to creatively capitalize on the imposed online teaching in looking for innovative research and personal development under the conditions of COVID-19. Furthermore, our results confirmed the gender and age differences in EC. The differences in EC according to position and type of science were not statistically significant. These results compel us to be aware of the importance of the emotional side of creativity to optimize stress-related behavior under the conditions of limited abilities to continue as usual. More space devoted to the manifestation of all the aspects of emotional creativity would improve adaptation to challenging circumstances and even allow one to capitalize on new opportunities. Moreover, we suggest that if personal intrinsic Emotional Creativity is high, the crises, such as the COVID-19 epidemic, may improve adaptation and trigger creative outcomes. (shrink)

Peter Homans offers a new understanding of the origins of psychoanalysis and relates the psychoanalytic project as a whole to the sweep of Western culture, past and present. He argues that Freud's fundamental goal was the interpretation of culture and that, therefore, psychoanalysis is fundamentally a humanistic social science. To establish this claim, Homans looks back at Freud's self-analysis in light of the crucial years from 1906 to 1914 when the psychoanalytic movement was formed and shows how these experiences culminated (...) in Freud's cultural texts. By exploring the "culture of psychoanalysis," Homans seeks a better understanding of what a "psychoanalysis of culture" might be. Psychoanalysis, Homans shows, originated as a creative response to the withering away of traditional communities and their symbols in the aftermath of the industrial revolution. The loss of these attachments played a crucial role in the lives of the founders of psychoanalysis, especially Sigmund Freud but also Karl Abraham, Carl Jung, Otto Rank, and Ernest Jones. The personal, political, and religious losses that these figures experienced, the introspection that followed, and the psychological discovery that resulted are what Homans calls "the ability to mourn." Homans expands this historical analysis to construct a general model of psychological discovery: the loss of shared ideals and symbols can produce a deeper sense of self (psychological structure-building, or individuation) and can then lead to the creation of new forms of meaning and self-understanding. He shows how Freud, Jung, and other psychoanalysts began to extend their introspection outward, reinterpreting the meanings of Western art, history, and religion. In conclusion, Homans evaluates Freud's theory of culture and discusses the role that psychoanalysis might play in social and cultural criticism. Throughout the book, Homans makes use of the many histories, biographies, and psychobiographies that have been written about the origins of psychoanalysis, drawing them into a comprehensive sociocultural model. Rich in insights and highly original in approach, this work will interest psychoanalysts and students of Freud, sociologists concerned with modernity and psychoanalysis, and cultural critics in the fields of religion, anthropology, political science, and social history. (shrink)

Psychometrically sound instruments that assess temporal dynamics of creative abilities are limited. The Ambulatory Battery of Creativity is designed to assess creative ideation performance multiple times in everyday life and was proven to capture the intra-individual dynamic of creative abilities reliably and validly. The present ambulatory study aimed to replicate and extend the psychometric evidence of the novel ABC. Sixty-nine participants worked on the ABC during a 5-day ambulatory assessment protocol. Each day, participants completed six randomly presented (...) items of the verbal and the figural ABC. Matching previous psychometric analyses, the results indicated good between-person and good within-person reliability. Furthermore, evidence for between-person and within-person validity of the ABC was obtained. Performance in the verbal and the figural ABC were interrelated and correlated with an independent measure of creative potential. The verbal ABC was further associated with openness, self-reported creative behavior, creative activities, and creative achievements, thus providing additional evidence of construct validity, especially for the verbal ABC. Finally, the verbal and the figural ABC yielded convincing within-person validity: Longer response times and higher subjective originality ratings were associated with more original ideas. This replication and extension of the ABC’s psychometric properties indicates that it enables a reliable and valid assessment of moment-to-moment fluctuations of creative ideation abilities in everyday life, which may facilitate the investigation of exciting new research questions related to dynamic aspects of creative ability. (shrink)

Throughout the history of psychoanalysis, the study of creativity and fine art has been a special concern. _Psychoanalytic Studies of Creativity, Greed and Fine Art: Making Contact with the Self_ makes a distinct contribution to the psychoanalytic study of art by focusing attention on the relationship between creativity and greed. This book also focuses attention on factors in the personality that block creativity, and examines the matter of the self and its ability to be present and exist as (...) the essential element in creativity. Using examples primarily from visual art_ David Levine_ explores the subjects of creativity, empathy, interpretation and thinking through a series of case studies of artists, including Robert Irwin, Ad Reinhardt, Susan Burnstine, and Mark Rothko. _Psychoanalytic Studies of Creativity, Greed and Fine Art_ explores the highly ambivalent attitude of artists toward making their presence known, an ambivalence that is evident in their hostility toward interpretation as a way of knowing. This is discussed with special reference to Susan Sontag’s essay on the subject of interpretation. Psychoanalytic Studies of Creativity, Greed and Fine Art contributes to a long tradition of psychoanalytically influenced writing on creativity including the work of Deri, Kohut, Meltzer, Miller and Winnicott among others. It will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists, historians and theorists of art. (shrink)

Creativity — A New Vocabulary proposes a novel approach to the way in which we talk and think about creativity. It covers a variety of topics not commonly associated with creativity that offer us valuable insights and open up new and exciting possibilities for creative action. This collection of essays challenges the 'traditional' vocabulary of creativity and its preference for individuals, brains, cognition, personality, divergent thinking, insight, and problem solving. Instead, the book proposes a more dynamic and relational (...) perspective that considers creativity as an embodied, social, material, and cultural process. This book will be useful for a wide range of specialists within the humanities and social sciences, as well as practitioners from applied fields who are looking for novel ways of thinking about and doing creative work. (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)

The article deals with the little-studied but actual problem of loneliness of an outstanding creative personality as a consequence of stereotypical understanding of his works and activity. The cultural and philosophical meaning of Ivan Turgenev’s motif of loneliness is that he was a lone creator, recognized by Russian critics and historians of literature only in the context of the activities of other recognized great writers: Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov. The problem of loneliness is revealed through the paradoxical (...) statement by Turgenev on the question about strange loners and aggressive crowd. The paper presents the loneliness of I.S. Turgenev as a rejection of the understandable and normality among the non-understandable and weirdness. In Russian literatury critical and historico-cultural tradition, during the discussion of Russian classics, the general opinion has been formed: Turgenev is apparently non-Russian author, moreover he is not a classic writer indeed. (shrink)

Everything you have been told about creativity is wrong. From line managers, corporate CEOs, urban designers, teachers, politicians, mayors, advertisers and even our friends and family, the message is 'be creative'. Creativity is heralded as the driving force of our contemporary society; celebrated as agile, progressive and liberating. It is the spring of the knowledge economy and shapes the cities we inhabit. It even defines our politics. What could possibly be wrong with this? In this brilliant, counter intuitive blast (...) Oli Mould demands that we rethink the story we are being sold. Behind the novelty, he shows that creativity is a barely hidden form of neoliberal appropriation. It is a regime that prioritizes individual success over collective flourishing. It refuses to recognise anything - job, place, person - that is not profitable. And it impacts on everything around us: the places where we work, the way we are managed, how we spend our leisure time. Is there an alternative? Mould offers a radical redefinition of creativity, one embedded in the idea of collective flourishing, outside the tyranny of profit. Bold, passionate and refreshing, Against Creativity, is a timely correction to the doctrine of our times. (shrink)

"Henry Corbin's works are the best guide to the visionary tradition.... Corbin, like Scholem and Jonas, is remembered as a scholar of genius. He was uniquely equipped not only to recover Iranian Sufism for the West, but also to defend the principal Western traditions of esoteric spirituality."--From the introduction by Harold Bloom Ibn 'Arabi (1165-1240) was one of the great mystics of all time. Through the richness of his personal experience and the constructive power of his intellect, he made a (...) unique contribution to Shi'ite Sufism. In this book, which features a powerful new preface by Harold Bloom, Henry Corbin brings us to the very core of this movement with a penetrating analysis of Ibn 'Arabi's life and doctrines. Corbin begins with a kind of spiritual topography of the twelfth century, emphasizing the differences between exoteric and esoteric forms of Islam. He also relates Islamic mysticism to mystical thought in the West. The remainder of the book is devoted to two complementary essays: on "Sympathy and Theosophy" and "Creative Imagination and Creative Prayer." A section of notes and appendices includes original translations of numerous Su fi treatises. Harold Bloom's preface links Sufi mysticism with Shakespeare's visionary dramas and high tragedies, such as The Tempest and Hamlet . These works, he writes, intermix the empirical world with a transcendent element. Bloom shows us that this Shakespearean cosmos is analogous to Corbin's "Imaginal Realm" of the Sufis, the place of soul or souls. (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)

In what may be the most radical business book ever published, philosopher Jay Ogilvy shows that living without a goal is the only way to accomplish anything. In the 1980s we ran our lives with all the direction and confidence filofaxes and to-do lists could provide. Always knowing exactly where we were headed, we climbed toward the goals corporate America held out in front of us like so many carrots: higher salaries, better titles, more impressive offices. But after a decade (...) of climbing, the air is getting thin. We crave the chance to create, to express ourselves, and to make a difference, not just a living. It is time, says businessman/philosopher James Ogilvy, to tear up the to-do lists and grant ourselves the freedom to enjoy what E. M. Forster calls "the lights and shades that exist in the greyest conversation." Ogilvy shows that richness and color and flavor flood back into our lives once we set aside the goals that hold us captive. He explores how philosophers (from Plato to Nietzsche), lovers, ideologues, and executives have at one time or another lived without goals. What emerges from his argument is a new look at how to achieve personal creativity and freedom by fashioning one's day to-day life, not as a larger goal-producing machine, but as a personal work of art. (shrink)

With increased global competition and the advent of the knowledge economy, developing graduate students’ ability to innovate in their research has become a core focus of graduate education. Graduate students’ perceived help and assistance from supervisors is one of the key resources for research innovation. This study explored the relationships between graduate students’ perceived supervisor support and their innovative behavior in research, and examined the mediation effect of creative self-efficacy, their confidence in abilities to generate creative ideas (...) or produce creative outcomes. Survey data were collected from a sample of 996 Chinese graduate students. The results revealed that academic support was negatively related to idea generation and idea search; personal support was positively related to overcoming obstacles; autonomy support was positively related to all factors of innovative behavior except overcoming obstacles and innovation outputs. The mediation analysis suggested that creative self-efficacy significantly mediated the relationship between academic support and graduate students’ innovative behavior in research. The results of this study highlight the significance of both supervisor support and creative self-efficacy in developing graduate students’ research innovation. The findings have significant implications for stimulating students’ research innovation and for improving the quality of graduate education. (shrink)

The notion of creativeness is widely used in a number of sciences. The same time meaning of this word is not so obvious as it may seem at first sight. In most cases the notion definitions contain only one of it's meaning features unchangeable: creativeness is a kind of ability to create something new. There are several sometimes absolutely different points of view regarding to the following questions: who is a bearer of this ability, what are the main (...) peculiarities of it’s appearance, not to mention its formation possibility and methods. We analyze these points of view to approach to the comprehension of the nature of creativeness. Demands of modern world to person increase. Creativeness is one of these aspects. Besides this one is foundation of human’s nature. Sodeciding this problem we make a base for solving many other problems. Probably the decision of this problem lies in dividing of creativeness types. (shrink)

The philosophical understanding of scientific creativity cannot be limited to the analysis of cognitive abilities or ways of solving problems. It is always anthropologically-laden, based on a historically specific image image of a human being that acquires knowledge. The problem of creativity also articulates a well-known paradox of novelty: the new does not arise from the old, since it is significantly different from it, but it cannot arise from nothing, because then it remains incomprehensible. Paul Feyerabend criticizes such a “mysterianic” (...) concept of scientific creativity, which emphasizes its emergent character, i.e. its suddenness and inexplicability. The distance between subject and object, man and nature, knowledge and reality in this case remains insurmountable. To solve this problem, it is necessary to place creativity in the space between the uniqueness of the creative personality and the mechanisms of social recognition. This, in turn, requires rethinking of the ontological content of creativity, as well as the concept of “labor” with reference to its treatment by Karl Marx’ rethinking of it as the production of not only material goods, but also of the person itself. Moreover, creativity does not just form a person: it is a way of cultivating the entire social space. An unexpected move is provided by an appeal to a new social group – the precariat, which in science gives a lesson in openness to novelty and theoretical freedom. As a result, a deeper understanding of the social base of creativity arises, and a new strategy for the interaction of the scientific community with extra-paradigm groups and marginal individuals is being built. (shrink)

The article offers a socio-historical approach to the problem of creative personality in polemic with the article by A.M. Dorozhkin and S.V. Shibarshina. Creative activity is considered not as a psychological process or an expression of cognitive abilities, but as a result evaluated by the professional scientific community and even by the entire society. The distinction between the psychological, historical and historical-epistemological interpretation of creativity is discussed. The authors argue that although the proposed approach has an explanatory (...) potential for creativity as a socio-historical phenomenon, it reduces the nature of individual personalities and their role in scientific research to a public response to a new result. The personality of an author is getting vanished in this result, becoming only a label of some social achievement. Using the terminology of J.-P. Sartre, the essence of the author as a unique individual is reduced to his social existence as a scientist. The purpose of this existence is not the fulfillment of a vocation, but the implementation of a professional mission to promote science as a public good, which consists, among other things, in creating a field of intellectual tension. The scientist ensures the objective increase of public awareness of the painful points of history and modernity; critically analyzes global risks from ecology to security; and presents images of a possible and required future. Thus, creative science acts as a source for development through problematization, a factor of cognitive dissonance, a troublemaker, a potential violator of social stability. (shrink)

Why does one need creativity? On a personal level, improvisation with available resources is needed for online coping with unforeseen environmental stimuli when existing knowledge and apparent action strategies do not work. On a cultural level, the exploitation of existing cultural means and norms for the deliberate production of novel and valuable artifacts is a basis for cultural and technological development and extension of human action possibilities across various domains. It is less clear, however, how creativity develops and how exactly (...) one arrives at generating new action possibilities and producing multiple alternative action strategies using familiar objects. In this theoretical paper, we first consider existing accounts of the creative process in the Alternative Uses Task and then present an alternative interpretation, drawing on sociocultural views and an embodied cognition approach. We explore similarities between the psychological processes underlying the generation of new uses in the Alternative Uses Task and children’s pretend play. We discuss possible cognitive mechanisms and speculate how the generation of new action possibilities for common objects in pretend play can be related to adults’ ability to generate new action strategies associated with object use. Implications for creativity development in humans and embodied artificial agents are discussed. (shrink)

Joseph Margolis holds that both artworks and selves are ”culturally emergent entities." Culturally emergent entities are distinct from and not reducible to natural or physical entities. Artworks are thus not reducible to their physical media; a painting is thus not paint on canvas and music is not sound. In a similar vein, selves or persons are not reducible to biology, and thought is not reducible to the physical brain. Both artworks and selves thus have two ongoing and inseparable ”evolutions”—one cultural (...) and one physical. Rather than having fixed ”natures” that remain stable for any purpose other than numerical identity, artworks and selves have ”careers” due to their cultural evolution that change with the course and flux of history, interpretation and reinterpretation. The question for this essay is how a Margolisian encultured artist, who is also an individual ”self," can construct an identifiable ”career” that is both from culture and develops culture constructively in a way that involves an individual, as well as collective, contribution. In answering this question I will provide a theory that shows how Margolis’ work on the artist as cultural agent leaves room for creative innovators within a cultural context. In short, I claim that Margolis’ idea that a person is a thinking-and-doing practitioner that emerges from and works within a cultural context does allow for the agent to use that same context to acquire the tools and skills necessary to make something new. I will then consider how this innovation might be possible by making recourse to some theories of creativity from neuroscience and psychology. This essay will focus on Margolis’ theory of the creative artist as cultural agent as supplemented with an account of the nature of the human being as a raw set of genetic materials and capacity for acquiring cultural competence. My claim is that this is the site for an adequate account of how some encultured persons are able to create exceptional innovations in artistic domains and others are not. I agree with Margolis that it is true that innovation is not possible by any pre- or non-encultured self but I also think that extremes of cultural mastery and innovation, as in the case of highly creative and innovative artists, are not possible without an inborn potentiality to develop to a high level of cultural ability under the right conditions. This is not to deny Margolis’ theory of artists as cultural agents. Indeed, I accept Margolis’ view of the deep importance of culture to the development of the self and to the creative artist wholeheartedly. I also agree that this is a crucial aspect of artistic agency and creativity that has been given short shrift in analytic aesthetics. My intention here is only to answer one question that is still left unanswered after understanding and acknowledging the importance of culture: How do we account for the disparity in ability in cultural agents and artists that cannot be attributed to cultural training and socio-historical factors? How do we account for the existence of the exceptionally creative artist in a situation where the cultural and socio-historical factors are roughly equivalent for others who demonstrate lesser amounts of creativity? (shrink)

The presence of a basic and general form of creativity in people is investigated through experiments with music. The results indicate that “generative” creativity—‐the ability to spontaneously generate a music by varying a basic set of musical elements—is a basic human endowment, unlike “constructive” creativity—‐the type of creativity exhibited by composers and other artists—‐which is the result of training and the spehal development of faculties. Generative creativity's coming to the fore in contemporary people would contribute to the development of (...) the personality and help bring about more fulfilled, better balanced people and societies. (shrink)

Drawing on an extensive yet concise review of the history of cross-cultural aesthetics, the volume presents the scientists and artists working in the new world of transformative arts.

In a certain sense, trust really cannot be created at all, because trust lies outside that which we can decide. But trust itself contains some creative element in the sense that trust allows our feeling for the new to gain a place in our experience of the world, including our experience of our own future and the future of others as promising. In that sense, there is an intrinsic element of generation or creation in trust. This circularity between trust (...) and creation points to a virtuous circle of dependency or interdependency between people that communicate. In order to describe this connection between maintaining an open mind towards the new and trust, trust is seen as threefold. It is an attitude of trust in oneself or self-confidence; it is trust in the people one knows and shares experiences with; and it is a more generalized trust understood as an affinity for new things – that is, confidence in meeting whatever the unknown brings on. Looking at both Hannah Arendt's and K.E. Løgstrup’s phenomenological analyses of trust, we see trust as the experience that one is not a sovereign being, but a being that is given over – or as Løgstrup puts it: surrendered - a self-surrender that entails a risk of becoming self-exposure if one’s trust is not accepted. The core of trust is that a person leaves something up to the other, and if that something falls on barren soil, then it withers and dies. But when we are seen and heard, not only as individuals, but as persons with opinions and actions, we achieve visibility, not only to others, we also become visible to ourselves, and experience the world as real in a manner we cannot access by any other means. Løgstrup even speaks of “a trust in life itself, in the ongoing renewal of life” when we are met by others in dialogue. The strength in Løgstrup’s and Arendt’s phenomenological analyses of trust lies in their ability to point out the mutual interdependency between self-surrender and trust, and between appearance and community. Appearance is the ability to be counted on as a person who can stand behind one's actions, and a person who can give promises to others. Community, in this context, both connects and divides us as people with different opinions and perspectives of the same thing. This makes the promise the ultimate deed a person can perform with words, namely, creating relationships with other people in mutuality and respect. One’s ability and, especially, one’s will to be bound to something and to allow oneself to be bound by the promise – these constitute the creativity of trust. Making a promise both creates and confirms the common space within which people count on each other and trust each other. (shrink)

This is an essay based on a story with observations, about present and sparkling moments from everyday life coexisting with a mother living with dementia. The story is used to begin philosophical underpinnings reflecting on ‘how it could be otherwise’. Dementia deploys brutal existential experiences such as cognitive deterioration, decline in mental functioning and often hurtful social judgements. The person living with dementia goes through transformation and changes of self. Cognitive decline progressively disrupts the foundations upon which social connectedness is (...) built, often creating a profound sense of insecurity. The challenge for carers and healthcare professionals is therefore to find ways of clarifying a concept of agency. It will be worthwhile developing the ability of attuning into ‘what is there’ arising from every corner of the care situation. Understanding and practicing this can strengthen existence and the experience of connectedness and meaning, empowering the person with dementia. It is important to find ways, relational moves, in which carers and healthcare professionals can embed the creativity appearing in mundane everyday situations filled with surplus of meaning, sharing mental landscapes (and embodied relational understanding) with the person living with dementia – seizing and sharing aesthetic moments (verbal and nonverbal) being present together. We argue that carers and healthcare professionals may find this understanding of care useful. This implies looking into a phenomenological‐hermeneutic perspective developing competences as well as practical wisdom understanding and being aware of the creative and innovative possibilities (often preverbal and unnoticed small things) in everyday life of what we, inspired by psychoanalyst Daniel Stern, call sparkling moments of meeting, creating experience with the other that is personally undergone and lived through in the present. (shrink)

In this Element, we’ll explore the nature of both imagination and creative thinking in an effort to understand the relation between them and also to understand their role in the vast array of activities in which they are typically implicated, from art, music, and literature to technology, medicine, and science. Focusing on the contemporary philosophical literature, we will take up several interrelated questions: What is imagination, and how does it fit into the cognitive architecture of the mind? What is (...) creativity? Is imagination required for creativity? Is creativity required for imagination? Is a person simply born either imaginative or not (and likewise, either creative or not), or are imagination and creativity skills that can be cultivated? And finally, are imagination and creativity uniquely human capacities, or can they be had by nonbiological entities such as AI systems? (shrink)

The article analyzes cultural crisis as a decline in human existential creativity. A review of the problematic nature of the conception of creativity shows that this concept is not strictly defined. Non-classical philosophers were among the first to theoretically ground the importance of creativity for an individual, their quality of life, the well-being of society, and the development of culture. From this philosophical perspective, it is shown that a human being has, as a natural creative faculty, an innate (...) class='Hi'>ability to create. This existential human creativity can be defined as the self-development of one's personality, the creation of one's life and environment. The causes and consequences of a decline in creativity are analyzed in the context of Spengler's conception of cultural crisis. The conclusion is reached that creative activity and creativity can be taken to be the most profound goal of a personality and its most perfect form of existence. From this existential creativity stems an authenticity of life, a creation of spiritual values, and an improvement and development of cultural forms. The disjunction of culture and civilization reveals that the establishment of an era of civilization and mass culture marks the decline of authentic culture as regards vibrant existential creative activity. (shrink)

Your artistry involves you intimately with the world around and beyond you. So your artistry involves profound but simple philosophical matters. As a human person, you are artful and philosophical, at the core of your being. Doorway to Artistry offers a playful, everyday philosophical approach necessary for life, integration, healing, and thriving in artistry. It reflects on the real and how we are involved with it, especially in our creative effort. In short, the real hospitably welcomes us, and in (...) our artistry we reciprocate in noble courtesy. Human persons were made for this communion with the real. Find in this book a hospitable welcome to belong at home beyond where you are. (shrink)

This chapter highlights the impact of the work of French phenomenologist Michel Henry and Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank on psychoanalysis. I contend that Henry and Rank clarify the nature and role of mindfulness and creativity in psychoanalysis. To begin, I draw out the implications of Henry’s critique of Freudian psychoanalysis. In my view, Henry’s work reveals and untangles basic inconsistencies in Freud’s views on the unconscious, affective layer of the subject’s life, and establishes that the creativity of life’s immanent movement (...) is essential to the development of the subject’s personality and to the acquisition and alleviation of neuroses. At the same time, I maintain that, while Henry’s work acknowledges a potential role for mindfulness in the development of life’s creativity, his account is problematic. At the end of the day, Henry’s conception of life as an immanent, self-enclosed reality fails to adequately account for the relation between life (creativity) and intentionality (mindfulness). As a result, it fails to sufficiently account for the intersubjective character of creativity and mindfulness. To address these issues, I bring Henry’s insights into these matters into dialogue with Rank’s psychology of difference, which similarly regards affectivity and creativity as central to human life and to psychoanalysis. By doing so, what comes forward is that mindfulness and creativity are relationships that can strengthen and weaken one another, and which always involve self-enclosure and openness towards others and the cosmos. Bearing this in mind, I maintain that mindfulness and creativity can play an important role in allowing psychoanalysis to realize its aim of improving the well-being of human beings. (shrink)

"A person, I want to argue is not a given but an achievement." So opens Eliot Deutsch's provocative study, a work that sets forth new possibilities for understanding the nature of creativity and the means by which human beings fashion themselves and their worlds. Professor Deutsch develops an innovative way of moving beyond the limitations of traditional rationalism, empiricism, and analytical philosophy of mind to frame a new conception of what it means to be a person.

One of the foremost scientists and thinkers of our time, David Bohm worked alongside Oppenheimer and Einstein. In Science, Order and Creativity he and physicist F. David Peat propose a return to greater creativity and communication in the sciences. They ask for a renewed emphasis on ideas rather than formulae, on the whole rather than fragments, and on meaning rather than mere mechanics. Tracing the history of science from Aristotle to Einstein, from the Pythagorean theorem to quantum mechanics, the authors (...) offer intriguing new insights into how scientific theories come into being, how to eliminate blocks to creativity and how science can lead to a deeper understanding of society, the human condition and the human mind itself. Science, Order and Creativity looks to the future of science with elegance, hope and enthusiasm. (shrink)

It is a widely accepted assumption within the philosophy of mind and psychology that our ability for complex social interaction is based on the mastery of a common folk psychology, that is to say that social cognition consists in reasoning about the mental states of others in order to predict and explain their behavior. This, in turn, requires the possession of mental-state concepts, such as the concepts belief and desire. In recent years, this standard conception of social cognition has (...) been called into question by proponents of so-called ‘direct-perception’ approaches to social cognition and by those who argue that the ‘received view’ implies a degree of computational complexity that is implausible. In response, it has been argued that these attacks on the classical view of social cognition have no bite at the subpersonal level of explanation, and that it is the latter which is at issue in the debate in question. In this paper, I critically examine this response by considering in more detail the distinction between personal and subpersonal level explanations. There are two main ways in which the distinction has been developed. I will argue that on either of these, the response proposed by defenders of the received view is unconvincing. This shows that the dispute between the standard conception and alternative approaches to mindreading is a dispute concerning personal-level explanations - what is at stake in the debate between proponents of the classical view of social cognition and their critics is how we, as persons, navigate our social world. I will conclude by proposing a pluralistic approach to social cognition, which is better able to do justice to the multi-faceted nature of our social interactions as well as being able to account for recent empirical findings regarding the social cognitive abilities of young infants. (shrink)

This article is the attempt of an historically oriented analysis focused on the role of Nigerian music as a cultural hub for the export of African cultural influences into the Black diaspora in the United States and its anticipation by the Free Jazz/Avantgarde-scene as well as the import of key-values related to the Black Power-movement to the African continent. The aim is to demonstrate the leading role and international impact of Nigeria's cultural industry among sub-saharan African nation states and its (...) specific ability to absorb and incorporate elements of Western culture. -/- After a short discussion of African influences on jazz music in general and the socio-political, cultural, and artistic context in which Free Jazz emerged, examples for the articulation of African consciousness among influencing key figures such as saxophonist John Coltrane or the Art Ensemble of Chicago are being presented. Furthermore, the personal and ideological links between the Avantgarde Jazz-scene and the Black Power-movement - especially the Black Panther Party - are made transparent. -/- In a second step the central influence of the Nigerian drum-pioneer Babatunde Olatunji on the Africanization of US-Jazz musicians, his personal and creative impact on John Coltrane, as well as the Black Power-movement is being highlighted. On the other hand, Coltrane, Free Jazz, and the Black Panther Party are being portrayed as a central creative and ideological turn in the career and work of Fela Kuti and towards political activism and his efforts to implement and apply the Africa-inspired Black Power -struggle of the US on the African continent in order to fight post-colonial forms of oppression. -/- . (shrink)

Joaquín M. Fuster is an eminent cognitive neuroscientist whose research over the last five decades has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of the neural structures underlying cognition and behaviour. This book provides his view on the eternal question of whether we have free will. Based on his seminal work on the functions of the prefrontal cortex in decision-making, planning, creativity, working memory, and language, Professor Fuster argues that the liberty or freedom to choose between alternatives is a function of (...) the cerebral cortex, under prefrontal control, in its reciprocal interaction with the environment. Freedom is therefore inseparable from that circular relationship. The Neuroscience of Freedom and Creativity is a fascinating inquiry into the cerebral foundation of our ability to choose between alternative actions and to freely lead creative plans to their goal. (shrink)