Arthur C. Danto did not live to witness the proliferation of AI in artistic creation. However, his philosophy of art offers key ideas about art that can provide an interesting perspective on artwork generated by artificial intelligence (AI). In this article, I analyze how his ideas about contemporary art, intention, interpretation, and authorship could be applied to the ongoing debate about AI and artistic creation. At the same time, it is also interesting to consider whether the incorporation of AI into (...) artistic creation marks a new chapter in the narrative, which seems to have reached its end, or if it represents a significant rupture with past artistic traditions. (shrink)

Philosophers of language and linguists tend to think of the interpreter as an essentially non-creative participant in the communicative process. There’s no room, in traditional theories, for the view that correctness of interpretation depends in some essential way on the interpreter. As a result, there’s no room for the possibility that while P is the correct interpretation of an utterance, u, for one interpreter, P* is the correct interpretation of that utterance for another interpreter. Recently, a number of theorists have, (...) for separate reasons, argued in favour of a radically different view of communication – a view in which the interpreter and her context play what should be thought of as a content-creating role. According to such views, natural languages contain what I’ll call interpretation sensitive terms: terms the correct interpretation of which varies across interpreters (or, more generally, contexts of interpretation).3 An interpretation sensitive sentence can have one content relative to one interpreter and another content relative to another interpreter. This paper is a development and (partial) defence of the view that interpretation sensitivity is ubiquitous in natural language. I call the view that there are interpretation sensitive terms content relativism. Before starting the discussion of content relativism, it is worth pointing out that recent attempts to develop semantically motivated versions of truth relativism should be seen as part of this trend of giving the interpreter a more active role. (shrink)

Creative synthesis, an interpretation of causality developed by Charles Hartshorne in his philosophical works, attempts to provide a way out of the determinism-indeterminism debate in philosophical discussions. At the same time, it is grounded in contemporary physics which regards effects as statistical averages rather than fully predictable results of the action of causes. This paper will seek to contextualise this interpretation of causality within the metaphysics of Charles Hartshorne, establish its basis and develop its implications. The resulting philosophy of action, (...) grounded in the principle of dipolarity that provides a new insight into the cause-and-effect relationship, attempts to address the issues of activity/ receptivity, novelty/givenness, and freedom/restriction not only in the human sphere but also in the whole of reality. (shrink)

Creativity in Whitehead is analogous to prime matter in Aristotle; both principles serve as the counterpart of form. A fundamental difference is that whereas prime matter is purely passive, creativity is pure activity. ;My dissertation focuses on the question whether creativity in some sense exists as numerically one running throughout the entire universe, or only as numerically many in the many individual actual entities which are the basis of his avowed ontological pluralism? ;The most common view in the literature is (...) that creativity exists only as many . Four leading commentators are examined, and each is seen to face a problem with creativity's on-goingness. If creativity exists only in its individuals, then why do new individuals continue to come into existence? Two of the commentators attempt to answer this question by appealing, each in a slightly different way, to creativity's universality; but in both cases it is argued that this form of answer is circular for the pluralist must show that creativity is universal in the future. ;Two other interpreters of creativity are examined who emphasize creativity's causal role in perpetuating the universe. Analysis of their interpretations shows that each in fact requires creativity to be something numerically one throughout the universe , though this view is not made explicit. ;A monistic interpretation is then put forward and defended against a common criticism; namely, that it is inconsistent with Whitehead's ontological pluralism. It is argued that creativity implies process and process implies a plurality of stages. The monistic creativity is not more real than its plurality of stages, since these stages are essential to its being a creating activity. Creativity is merely the counterpart of form; each stage of creativity's process has its own ingredient eternal objects and its own subjective aim at satisfaction in terms of which it is a novel atomic individual . A monistic creativity does not imply ontological monism. Furthermore, since it solves the problem of on-goingness, it should replace the received pluralistic interpretation. (shrink)

This article explores Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as an “object of care” for use in examining the relationship between creativity and responsibility in the sciences and beyond. Through three short sketches from different disciplinary lenses—literature, science and technology studies, and feminist studies—readers get a sense of the different ways scholars might consider Shelley’s text as an object of care. Through an analysis and synthesis of these three sketches, the authors illustrate the value of such an object in thinking about broad cultural (...) issues. The article acts as a kind of boundary object by creating distinct, yet overlapping narratives from an object that is owned by many social worlds. The three sketches reveal Frankenstein as a thoughtful consideration about what it means to care for, or fail to care for, one’s creation, rather than as a cautionary tale about the evils of scientific hubris. Although infrastructures at universities often prevent interdisciplinary dialogue, the article concludes that purposeful boundary objects created around objects of care like Frankenstein can help build bridges and create shared meanings for new interdisciplinary spaces. (shrink)

I argue that a Heideggerian reading of the concept of cheng 誠 strengthens Roger Ames's interpretation of the Confucian concept by providing a grounding framework that connects various dimensions of the concept.

In this article, I demonstrate that Friedrich Nietzsche offers us a unique form of hermeneutic critique. In particular, I contend that when reading Nietzsche’s perspectivism and will to power in light of each other, they provide us with the tools to overcome habits of interpretation through the concepts of genealogy and creative hermeneutics. I show this in three sections. In section one, I introduce Nietzsche’s perspectivism and situate it within his concept of the will to power. In doing so, I (...) demonstrate that interpretations exist amidst a complex field of agonistic, reciprocal relations in life’s constant production of meaning. In section two, I then analyze how certain interpretations sediment into habits, forming harmful blind spots in interpretive activity. Such habits, Nietzsche shows, when privileged as prima facie ‘True’ and left uncontested exclude different ways of interpreting and existing, stagnating the production of meaning and denying the agonistic conditions of life. In the final section, I argue that Nietzsche critiques such habits in the two directions of genealogy and creative hermeneutics. Through the backward approach of genealogy, Nietzsche problematizes the habit, excavates its lowly origin, and deconstructs its supposed universality. Through the forward approach of creative hermeneutics, he overcomes and reinterprets them out of their origins, experiments with difference and multiplicity, and engages in an ongoing critique to open up new perspectives. (shrink)

I show that there is a link between the evolution of organisms and the evolution of ideas. In particular, if conformity is selected for, then mechanisms are needed so that “mutations” of ideas can occur. Creativity acts as a counter-force to conventional intelligence, so that ideas can develop that do not just elaborate existing paradigms, but oppose these paradigms. Sometimes oppositional ideas go too far, however, and wisdom acts as a force to bring the old and the new together. The (...) dialectic thus integrates intelligence, creativity, and wisdom, with intelligence serving as thesis, creativity as antithesis, and wisdom as synthesis. (shrink)

It is common knowledge that Martin Heidegger’s attempts at engaging non-Western philosophy are very much a construct of his own making. This article in no way seeks to disagree with those observations, but argues two things: first, that Heidegger’s “dialogue” with his two main other sources of inspiration, the ancient Greek thinkers and the German poets, is not different in kind or in principle from his engagement with East Asia. One can of course quite easily argue that Heidegger’s main interest (...) was the ancient Greek thinkers, and then the poets, and only lastly Asia. But this hierarchy in preference does not make Heidegger’s approach different in kind or in principle. Second, I argue that there is an important place in comparative philosophy for the type of thinking displayed by Heidegger in this kind of Auseinandersetzung (confrontation) with—and “appropriation” of—Asian (or Greek, or Poetic) thought. (shrink)

From the swirling stars above, to the end-directed design of life below, to the perceptions and emotions that color the world within—as more and more phenomena prove susceptible to scientific description, explanation, prediction, and control, the naturalistic metainduction grows increasingly plausible: perhaps nature is self-enclosed, so that everything that makes a difference within the world is itself part of the world; perhaps there are no disembodied agents—neither ghosts nor gods—whose actions influence our shared day-to-day world. Because neither the expansion of (...) science’s adequacy nor the concomitant pressure toward philosophical naturalism show signs of abating, the recent emergence of religious naturalism.. (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)

In recent work, Herman Cappelen has defended a position he calls content relativism (CR): the thesis that one and the same utterance may have different content at different contexts of assessment or interpretation. In his most recent treatment of the topic, Cappelen argues for CR using examples involving prescriptive language: instructions, orders, and laws. By pointing out some problems for Cappelen’s argument and suggesting ways they might be fixed, I hope to show how CR might best be developed and defended.

Previous work has reported that children creatively make syntactic errors that are ungrammatical in their target language, but are grammatical in another language. One of the most well‐known examples is medial wh‐question errors in English‐speaking children's wh‐questions (e.g., What do you think who the cat chased? from Thornton, 1990). The evidence for this non‐target‐like structure in both production and comprehension has been taken to support the existence of innate, syntactic parameters that define all possible grammatical variation, which serve as a (...) top‐down constraint guiding children's language acquisition process. The present study reports new story‐based production and comprehension experiments that challenge this interpretation. While we replicated previous observations of medial wh‐question errors in children's sentence production (Experiment 1), we saw a reduction in evidence indicating that English‐speaking children assign interpretations that conform to the medial wh‐question pattern (Experiment 2). Crucially, we found no correlation between production and comprehension errors (Experiment 3). We suggest that these errors are the result of children's immature sentence production mechanisms rather than immature grammatical knowledge. (shrink)

I discuss a puzzle that shows there is a need to develop a new metaphysical interpretation of mathematical theories, because all well-known interpretations conflict with important aspects of mathematical activities. The new interpretation, I argue, must authenticate the ontological commitments of mathematical theories without curtailing mathematicians' freedom and authority to creatively introduce mathematical ontology during mathematical problem-solving. Further, I argue that these two constraints are best met by a metaphysical interpretation of mathematics that takes mathematical entities to be constitutively constructed (...) by human activity in a manner similar to the constitutive construction of the US Supreme Court by certain legal and political activities. Finally, I outline some of the philosophical merits of metaphysical interpretations of mathematical theories of this type. (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)

Recent advances in the field of creative cognition have helped to reveal the cognitive structures and processes that are involved in creative thinking and imagination. This article begins by reviewing recent studies of creative imagery that have explored the emergent properties of mental images. The geneplore model of creative cognition, which describes how preinventive structures such as creative mental images are generated and interpreted, is then discussed. In discussing this model and its implications, a distinction is made between aspects of (...) creative imagery that reflect conscious, deliberate control and those that reflect the absence of such control, as illustrated particularly by the emergence of unanticipated structures in imagined forms. The intentional, structured qualities of creative thinking are then contrasted with its spontaneous, unstructured qualities. The article concludes by discussing the recent topics of chaotic cognition and creative realism and how they bear on the general issue of balancing structured and unstructured processes in creative endeavors. (shrink)

Moral creativity consists in identifying, interpreting, and implementing moral values in ways that bring about new and morally valuable results, often in response to an unprecedented situation. It does not mean inventing values subjectively, as Sartre and Nietzsche suggested. Moral creativity plays a significant role in meeting role responsibilities, exercising leadership, developing social policies, and living authentically in light of moral ideals. Kenneth R. Feinberg’s service in compensating the victims of 9/11 provides a paradigm instance.

We have, as a theological community, generally lost a language in which to speak of the created-ness of the world. As a consequence, our discourses of reason cannot bridge the way we know God and the way we know the world. Therefore, argues Oliver Davies, a primary task of contemporary theology is the regeneration of a Christian account of the world as sacramental, leading to the formation of a Christian conception of reason and a new Christocentric understanding of the real. (...) Both the Johannine tradition of creation through the Word and a Eucharistic semiotics of Christ as the embodied, sacrificial and creative speech of God serve the project of a repairal of Christian cosmology. The world itself is viewed as a creative text authored by God, of which we as interpreters are an integral part. This is a wide-ranging and convincing book that makes an important contribution to modern theology. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Overcoming Cartesian Dualism with a New Interpretation of Action Creativity or Rationality as the Nexus in Social Theory? How Rational is Rational Choice? Creative Pragmatism and Economic Sociology How Do Values Emerge? The Contingency of Social Change.

Creative Experiencing was an unpublished manuscript found among Hartshorne’s papers now deposited at the Center for Process Studies at the Claremont School of Theology. Hartshorne mentions in the manuscript’s preface that he considered the book to be the final part of a trilogy including Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method (1970) and Wisdom as Moderation (1987). The book was edited and published under the direction of longtime Hartshorne scholars Donald Viney and Jincheol O.“Metaphysics,” Hartshorne writes in the preface, “is the attempt (...) to interpret concrete experience rationally, in terms of the most general principles of valid reasoning” (xi). The first chapter, “Some Formal Criteria of Good .. (shrink)

Tu Wei-ming is the foremost exponent of Confucian thought in the United States today. Over the last two decades he has been developing a creative scholarly interpretation of Confucian humanism as a living tradition. The result is a work of interpretive brilliance that revitalizes Confucian thought, making it a legitimate concern of contemporary philosophical reflections.

In the study, the phenomenon of academic plagiarism is considered a result of creative scientific activity, which exists in a certain institutional design and is immersed in the appropriate environment and economic, socio-political circumstances. The study uses philosophical principles as a method—humanistic, historical, comprehensiveness and determinism, system and practice, specificity and activity. The historical retrospective shows that theft and misappropriation of other people’s intellectual property existed already in ancient societies. The prevalence of the phenomenon and the ambiguity of its interpretation (...) inspired us to explore academic plagiarism in its various aspects. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to contribute to the conceptualization of creativity in education. The article makes use of the self-Bildung perspective, which is an up-to-date version of the Neo-humanistic notion of the formation of the personality in order to interpret the original notion of the 'four stages' of the creative process. The conclusion is that in this perspective creativity can be understood as a state of transcendence and a practice of taste. Finally, the article seeks to sketch out (...) a suggestion of the creative capacities that are important to cultivate in education. (shrink)

This paper attempts to explore the position that A. N. Whitehead's ultimate principle of creativity may be identified explicitly as an eternal object. Such an interpretation seems to lend greater coherence to the categoreal scheme in Process and Reality and establish Whitehead's metaphysics as more of a rationalistic enterprise than most commentators are willing to admit. It would be rationalistic to the extent that its ultimate principle illustrates one of the categories of existence. That is, creativity may be viewed as (...) an eternal object rather than a surd element which falls outside the categoreal scheme. As eternal object, creativity would serve as the very foundation of rationality in Whitehead's metaphysical system. (shrink)

The main contributor to this volume is David Louis Miller of the University of Texas at Austin. Both a student of Mead's and an editor and defender of his thought, Miller attempts in his essay and subsequent responses to demonstrate both the overall coherence of Mead's philosophy and the extent to which that philosophy makes room for the concept of individual creativity. Miller thus corrects many false or otherwise superficial interpretations of Mead's social psychology, and of, by implication, contemporary symbolic (...) interactionism. (shrink)

In this reply to the article by A.M. Dorozhkin and S.V. Shibarshina, the question of the creative nature of the randomization technique is considered, which is understood as a rejection of logically obvious ways to solve scientific problems, and involves the inclusion of an element of randomness, or uncertainty, in the scientific search procedure. Some doubt is expressed about the consequences of introducing the technique of epistemological randomization into the tactics of solving scientific problems. The author of the article emphasizes (...) the fact that an attempt to solve scientific problems by an inclusion of other, non-scientific elements in the area of science may be a case of randomization. The author determines the areas which are subject to an uncertainty factor. Art and culture are regarded as such non-science areas. However, the appeal to uncertainty is an indication of a fundamental inability to describe in quantitative terms the origin of creativity. This position can be characterized as “misterianism” in the interpretation of creativity, by analogy with misterianism in the understanding of consciousness by K. McGinn. In this case, the randomization technique is nothing more than one of the possible conditions for creativity, which cannot guarantee the appearance of an original result. (shrink)

The thesis investigates the connection between deconstruction and creativity with regard to three aesthetic fields, namely jazz music, photography, and architecture. The thesis consists of three chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on deconstruction and jazz music. First, the analysis draws a comparison between the linguistic sign and the musical sign in the light of Derrida's analysis of signifier and signified. This supports an investigation of the supplementary character of writing in the specific case of jazz music. Second, the analysis draws an (...) analogy between the deconstructive reading of texts and jazz improvisation to show the relevance that creativity has for both. This is followed by an examination of the similarities between Derrida's notion of différance and the musical figure of syncopation. The analysis is completed by an argument that the jazz event of the jam session is an encounter and creative 'dialogue', with features similar to Derrida's conception of hospitality. Chapter 2 focuses on deconstruction and photography. First, the discussion explores the correlation between truth and photography. It will be argued that deconstruction challenges the logocentric organisation of photographs based on the prominence of what is immediately visible in images and fosters a more creative interpretation, which is based on the play between concealment and unconcealment within photographs. Second, it investigates the implications of Derrida's analysis of temporality for photography. This supports an investigation into how Derrida's notion of responsibility and the future to come can be applied to photography. Chapter 3 focuses on deconstruction and architecture. First, the analysis establishes the links between architecture and language by outlining the creative and transformative outcome that the correlation between function and meaning in the light of deconstruction produces. Second, the investigation examines Bernard Tschumi's idea of architecture as event in Parc de La Villette. Tschumi's work is an example of how the deconstructive approach adopted by architects fosters creativity in users. Finally, the analysis focuses on the transformative and creative character of portable architecture by investigating the correlation between the creative character of deconstructive concepts such as freeplay, parergon, and the axiom of incompleteness, and the transformative features of tents. (shrink)

Free agents can create and destroy value, for how much value is realized may well depend on what such agents choose to do. Not only may such agents create and destroy value, but such creation and destruction seem to involve a dimension of value: I call it creative value. An explication of the twin concepts of creating value and creative value is given, motivated by two desiderata. It is then shown that creative value turns out to be equivalent to what (...) Nozick has dubbed originative value, when his suggestive remarks are given a rigorous, although very natural, interpretation. Thus two highly plausible, but quite different, ways of characterizing creative value converge on a single concept. Furthermore, the account throws considerable light on two further areas of moral theory (namely, moral satisficing and the comparison principle) which turn out, rather unexpectedly, to be linked. (shrink)

SummaryThis paper criticizes the dualism of “thrownness” and “spontaneity” in Peter Gordon's interpretation of the Heidegger-Cassirer debate and shows that American pragmatism and other currents of thought offer an alternative in the form of a conception of situated creativity.

At the fore of concern within Whitehead scholarship are the main interpretive issues revolving around the relationships of God, creativity, and the world. Some critics have charged that Whitehead’s mature thought suffers from a lack of coherence in his formulation of the relationship between God and creativity as they function in cosmic generativity, a charge proven difficult to overcome. Such critics have posed the following question. In light of Whitehead’s commitment to the Ontological Principle, how can God and creativity stand (...) as separate formative elements in the world’s creative advance? This question illustrates, some say, how the separation of God from creativity within Whitehead’s process philosophy.. (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)