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)

Many prescriptions offered in the literature for enhancing creativity and innovation in organizations raise ethical concerns, yet creativity researchers rarely discuss ethics. We identify four categories of behavior proffered as a means for fostering creativity that raise serious ethical issues: breaking rules and standard operating procedures; challenging authority and avoiding tradition; creating conflict, competition and stress; and taking risks. We discuss each category, briefly identifying research supporting these prescriptions for fostering creativity and then we delve into ethical issues associated with (...) engaging in the prescribed behavior. These four rubrics illustrate ethical issues that need to be incorporated into the creativity and innovation literature. Recommendations for how organizations can respond to the ethical issues are offered based on practices of exemplary organizations and theories of organizational ethics. A research agenda for empirically investigating the ethical impact these four categories of behavior have on organizations concludes the article. (shrink)

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

Creativity: Theory, History, Practice offers important new perspectives on creativity in the light of contemporary critical theory and cultural history. Innovative in approach as well as argument, the book crosses disciplinary boundaries and builds new bridges between the critical and the creative. It is organized in four parts: · Why creativity now? offers much-needed alternatives to both the Romantic stereotype of the creator as individual genius and the tendency of the modern creative industries to treat everything as a commodity. · (...) Defining creativity, creating definitions traces the changing meaning of "create" from religious ideas of divine creation from nothing to advertising notions of concept creation. It also examines the complex history and extraordinary versatility of terms such as imagination, invention, inspiration and originality. · Creation as myth, story, metaphor begins with modern re-telling of early African, American and Australian creation myths and -picking up Biblical and evolutionary accounts along the way - works round to scientific visions of the Big Bang, bubble universes and cosmic soup. · Creative practices, cultural processes is a critical anthology of materials, chosen to promote fresh thinking about everything from changing constructions of "literature" and "design" to artificial intelligence and genetic engineering. Rob Pope takes significant steps forward in the process of rethinking a vexed yet vital concept, all the while encouraging and equipping readers to continue the process in their own creative or "re-creative" ways. Creativity: Theory, History, Practice is invaluable for anyone with a live interest in exploring what creativity has been, is currently, and yet may be. (shrink)

In this article I argue that, with the liberation of the hand from the tasks of locomotion in human evolution, unconscious use of the hands begins to create cultural forms. The first feature of the hands is its openness to the world. The second feature is its mediation between things and the body of which it is a part. The third feature is its self-referentiality. By touching, by giving form to a material, by gestures, and by establishing symbolic order in (...) the given world, the actions of the hand develop important preconditions for language, aesthetic forms, and social order. The hand itself assumes the most diverse shapes and gives different shapes to the objects around it. Touching and pointing produce the certainty that the indicated object exists, insofar as it is produced as object-for-the-hand. Its doubling in the use of the hand re-creates the object in a symbolic medium. This mimetic re-creation of the world is the main characteristic of the creativity of hand use. The two-sided plasticity of the hands divides the social universe into right and left halves, classified according to right-handed and left-handed values. The hand’s actual acquisition of this capacity is the result of a social process. In coordination with our visual sense, the use of the hands leads both to the making of objects and to the construction of worlds of subjective feelings. Both achievements are often ascribed to language. But the functions considered as most fundamental to language first take shape in the unconscious use of our hands. (shrink)

The following paper continues discussions within this journal about how the work of Delueze and Guattari can inform radical pedagogy. Building primarily on Noel Gough's 2004 paper, we take up the challenge to move towards a more creative form of 'becoming cyborg' in our teaching. In contrast to work that has focused on Deleuzian theories of the rhizome, we deploy Guattari's work on institutional schizoanalysis to explore the role of group creativity in radical pedagogy. The institutional therapies of Felix Guattari's (...) schizoanalytic practice in the 1950s and 1960s and, before him, the Francophone educationalist Celestin Freinet, who founded the Modern School Movement, are explored and used to illuminate examples of some of our own attempts to set the classroom up as a space for collective engagement. We conclude by exploring how this understanding of the class as subject group may be used to mobilise action and de-stabilise the coordinates of existing academic divisions of labour. (shrink)

Creativity is often portrayed as an X-factor that accounts for the spontaneous generation of the absolutely new. Yet the obsession with novelty implies a focus on final products and a retrospective attribution of their forms to unprecedented ideas in the minds of individuals, at the expense of any recognition of the form-generating potentials of the relations and processes in which persons and things are made and grown. In these processes, practitioners are characteristically called upon to copy the works of past (...) masters. However, though they may be guided by a script or score, every practitioner has to improvise his or her own passage through the array of tasks the performance entails. With examples from music, calligraphy and lace-making, I show that the wellsprings of creativity lie not inside people’s heads, but in their attending upon a world in formation. In this kind of creativity, undergone rather than done, imagination is not so much the capacity to come up with new ideas as the aspirational impulse of a life that is not just lived but led. But where it leads is not yet given. In opening to the unknown — in exposure — imagination leads not by mastery but by submission. Thus the creativity of undergoing, of action without agency, is that of life itself. (shrink)

What is the relationship between negative experience, artistic production, and prudential value? If it were true that (for some people) artistic creativity must be purchased at the price of negative experience (to be clear: currently no one knows whether this is true), what should we conclude about the value of such experiences? Are they worth it for the sake of art? The first part of this essay considers general questions about how to establish the positive extrinsic value of something intrinsically (...) negative. The second part emphasizes the importance of various distinctions within the realm of the negative. We must distinguish between adversity (which is non-mental) and negative mental states, and between negative thoughts (or attitudes) and negative affect. Within the realm of negative affect, we must distinguish between negative emotions and moods, on the one hand, and negative affective perspectives on the other, and then between mildly negative affective perspectives and severely negative ones (for which I reserve the term ‘suffering’). These distinctions matter greatly, since different types of negative experience have very different degrees of prudential disvalue. Although many types of negative experience may be “worth it”—because their positive extrinsic value outweighs their negative value—this is rarely true of severe suffering. (shrink)

An outstanding collection of specially commissioned chapters by leading philosophers who explore the relationship between philosophy and creativity. Essential readings for those interested in the philosophy of creativity, it is also an extremely useful resource for those in related subjects such as music, art and visual studies, literature and education.

This paper defends two initial claims. First, it argues that essentially the same cognitive resources are shared by adult creative thinking and problem-solving, on the one hand, and by childhood pretend play, on the other—namely, capacities to generate and to reason with suppositions (or imagined possibilities). Second, it argues that the evolutionary function of childhood pretence is to practice and enhance adult forms of creativity. The paper goes on to show how these proposals can provide a smooth and evolutionarily-plausible explanation (...) of the gap between the first appearance of our species in Southern Africa some 100,000 years ago, and the ‘creative explosion’ of cultural, technological and artistic change which took place within dispersed human populations some 60,000 years later. The intention of the paper is to sketch a proposal which might serve as a guide for future interdisciplinary research. 1 Introduction 2 Creativity and Pretence 3 Language and Creativity 4 Language and Cultural Accretions 5 Language, Play and Model-Building 6 Creativity, Protean Cognition and Sexual Selection 7 The Evolution of Pretence 8 The Emergence of Supposing 9 Pretence and Motivation 10 Two Objections 11 Conclusion. (shrink)

The article problematizes in aphoristic condensation the heterogeneous concepts of creativity in philosophy, psychology and sociology and outlines their paradoxes. Creativity in these concepts is tied to the human potential to bring into being something new and to the capacity of drawing differences. In its contingency, creativity is ambivalent to a high degree—at one and the same time a desirable resource and a threatening potential. So on the one hand, creativity is meant to be mobilized and set free; on the (...) other hand, it is meant to be controlled and reined in. The imperative of being creative is nowadays connected to the mobilization of the entrepreneurial self. Entrepreneurial action demands permanent innovation—and consequently ceaseless creative exertion. Everybody not only has to be simply creative, but more creative than the others. (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)

In Moral Creativity, John Wall argues that moral life and thought are inherently and radically creative. Human beings are called by their own primordially created depths to exceed historical evil and tragedy through the ongoing creative transformation of their world. This thesis challenges ancient Greek and biblical separations of ethics and poetic image-making, as well as contemporary conceptions of moral life as grounded in abstract principles or preconstituted traditions. Taking as his point of departure the poetics of the will of (...) Paul Ricoeur, and ranging widely into critical conversations with Continental, narrative, feminist, and liberationist ethics, Wall uncovers the profound senses in which moral practice and thought involve tension, catharsis, excess, and renewal. In the process, he draws new connections between sin and tragedy, practice and poetics, and morality and myth. Rather than proposing a complete ethics, Moral Creativity is a meta-ethical work investigating the creative capability as part of what it means, morally, to be human. This capability is explored around four dimensions of ontology, teleology, deontology, and social practice. In each case, Wall examines a traditional perspective on the relation of ethics to poetics, critiques it using resources from contemporary phenomenology, and develops a conception of a more original poetics of moral life. In the end, moral creativity is a human capability for inhabiting tensions among others and in social systems and, in the image of a Creator, creating together an ever more radically inclusive moral world. (shrink)

Everyday artistic creativity is downplayed in our schools, our lives, our culture. Yet here is an essential language of our lives, opening us to important ways of knowing, truth, beauty, and means for creative coping, as individuals and as cultures. Views of John Dewey and Suzanne Langer are each considered. A devaluation of artistic creativity may also reflect unacknowledged biases related to emotional "versus" intellectual knowing, gender stereotyping, science "versus" art, individualism "versus" interdependence, false stereotypes of creative "unhealth," and eminent (...) "versus" everyday creativity. Addressing these holds promise for our personal well-being and development, and our greater health as cultures. (shrink)

Article is devoted to consideration of development of ideas of collective creative education, features of a technique of the organization of collective creative affairs, a technique role in social creativity. The comparative analysis of the organization of collective creative business and the social project is presented in article, the characteristic of the main manifestations of social creativity is given.

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)

Hans Joas is one of the foremost social theorists in Germany today. Based on Joas’s celebrated study of George Herbert Mead, this work reevaluates the contribution of American pragmatism and European philosophical anthropology to theories of action in the social sciences. Joas also establishes direct ties between Mead’s work and approaches drawn from German traditions of philosophical anthropology. Joas argues for adding a third model of action to the two predominant models of rational and normative action—one that emphasizes the creative (...) character of human action. This model encompasses the other two, allowing for a more comprehensive theory of action. Joas elaborates some implications of his model for theories of social movements and social change and for the status of action theory in sociology in the face of competition from theories advanced by Luhmann and Habermas. The problem of action is of crucial importance in both sociology and philosophy, and this book—already widely debated in Germany—will add fresh impetus to the lively discussions current in the English-speaking world. (shrink)

Creativity is an emerging field of research for philosophy. A diachronic cultural value and fundamental human ability, creativity poses a host of questions that challenge us both on a theoretical and practical level. In this paper we explore creativity through the use of problem-solving lateral thinking techniques, as part of the C2Learn European Community research program. Lateral thinking is defined and then classified into three distinct kinds: conceptual, diagrammatic and emotive. Each kind is then explicated and its basic principles examined, (...) in an effort to shed light on the different ways the space of possible solutions is affected by each kind of lateral thought. It is this active engagement with the space of possibilities itself, that separates a mere problem-solver from an actual creator. (shrink)

The philosophy of mind concerns much about how novelty occurs in the world. The very recent progress in this field inspired by quantum mechanics indicates that symmetry restoration occurs in the mind at the moment when new creative thought arises. Symmetry restoration denotes the moment when one’s cognition leaves ordinary internalized mental schemes such as conceptual categories, heuristics, subjective theories, conventional thinking, or expectations. At this moment, fundamentally new, original thought may arise. We also predict that in older age, symmetry (...) restoration is less likely to occur as internalized mental schemes become more rigid in the elderly. Furthermore, the present study demonstrates that symmetry restoration may occur not only individually, in one’s mind, but also collectively, during collaborative creative activities, e.g. during small-group brainstorming sessions or creative improvisational performances. The possibility of collective symmetry restoration interacts well with the ideas in the field of relational ontology. Relational ontology highlights an important ontological role of relations. The ontological primacy is not given to individual entities, as in traditional metaphysics, but to relational structures and transformative relational processes (interactions). When accepting this assumption, we cannot imagine the situation when the actor’s mind could act absolutely independently and leave all of its relations as assumed in the compatibilist theory of free will. We argue that creative free action can be performed even in the case when the actor is entangled within their material, environmental, and social relational structures. (shrink)

For Merleau-Ponty, the question of phenomenological method was always connected to the problem of expression, in that the results of successful expression can for him amount to a catching of the world “in its nascent state”. In other words, elucidating the phenomena as they show themselves demands a certain amount of creativity to come through. But even though creative expression is without doubt of chief importance for Merleau-Ponty, it is not so easy to determine what exactly it consists in. Minimally, (...) it is more demanding than simply repeating an already formulated expression. On the other hand, it cannot start from nothing – we must begin within an existing tradition, with its acquired expressions, that we somehow take up and transform. A recurrent image of creative expression comes from Malraux, who claimed that it is a “coherent deformation” of what is given in the world. In this paper, I will use Saussure’s principle of analogy to throw light upon the notion of coherent deformation and of creativity. Although Merleau-Ponty merely mentions this principle in passing, I argue that it can clarify the productivity of language that he saw as crucial also for Saussure’s linguistics. (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.

Conventional categories of creativity are being deconstructed after the so-called postmodern debate. This article takes this process deeper, to what we will show is the hidden subtext of gender underlying how creativity has been socially constructed. It also proposes a more contextualized approach to creativity that takes into account both its individual and social dimensions and how this relates to what Eisler (1987) has called a partnership rather than dominator model of society.

Creativity is fundamental to human experience. In _On Creativity_ David Bohm, the world-renowned scientist, investigates the phenomenon from all sides: not only the creativity of invention and of imagination but also that of perception and of discovery. This is a remarkable and life-affirming book by one of the most far-sighted thinkers of modern times.

Mark Weinstein; Creativity and Discovery, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 27, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 275–280, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-975.

Creativity for Critical Thinkers is a how-to book in creative thinking, specifically orientated towards college courses in critical thinking and with a strong appeal to the general reader as well. It offers a vital but often overlooked set of thinking skills: multiplying options, brainstorming, lateral thinking, reframing problems, and many others. These skills are reinforced by applications and exercises covering a wide range of topics, from the annoyance of everyday life to the largest issues on the world stage.

The greatest rhetorical challenge to developers of creative artificial intelligence systems is convincingly arguing that their software is more than just an extension of their own creativity. This paper suggests that “creative autonomy,” which exists when a system not only evaluates creations on its own, but also changes its standards without explicit direction, is a necessary condition for making this argument. Rather than requiring that the system be hermetically sealed to avoid perceptions of human influence, developing creative autonomy is argued (...) to be more plausible if the system is intimately embedded in a broader society of other creators and critics. Ideas are presented for constructing systems that might be able to achieve creative autonomy. (shrink)

This paper presents some modern and interdisciplinary concepts about creativity and creative processes specially related to problem solving. Central publications related to the theme are briefly reviewed. Creative tools and approaches suitable to support problem solving are also presented. Finally, the paper outlines the author’s experiences using creative tools and approaches to: Facilitation of problem solving processes, strategy development in organisations, design of optimisation systems for large scale and complex logistic systems, and creative design of software optimisation for complex non-linear (...) systems. (shrink)

A metaphor can often create novel features in an object or a situation. This phenomenon has been particularly hard to account for using amodal symbol systems: although highlighting and downplaying can explain the shift of focus, it cannot explain how entirely new features can come about. We suggest here that the dynamism of perceptual symbol systems, particularly the notion of simulator, provides an elegant account of the creativity of metaphor. The elegance lies in the idea that the creation of new (...) features by a metaphor proceeds in the same way as the creation of regular features in a perceptual symbol. (shrink)

The title question and two subsequent questions are considered in the context of rational creativity. A-rational creativity is not considered.Q. Can creativity be taught?A. It depends on wh...

This article considers whether there exists today a movement of similar strength to the synthetic 'new theoretical movement' of the mid-1980s. The author argues that one main trend in sociological theory today is the notion of creativity and efforts to understand it conceptually. The contemporary growth of contingency, it is claimed, is closely related to this creative perspective. After examining Parsons's notion of 'double contingency', the article suggests that neither rationality nor normativity alone is able to dampen recognition of the (...) vicissitudes attached to both personal destinies and social evolution. The author analyses the axis of structure and action, theories of history and evolution, together with the relationship between modernity and reflexivity, in order to substantiate the claim that creativity constitutes a trend today. This trend is then related to another, the cognitive approach, and the author proposes some ideas to bring them closer. Finally, a hypothesis to explain the current stress on creativity is suggested. (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)

We live in an era of unprecedented interconnectivity and challenges that require global mindsets and creative approaches. While research on global identification has increased in recent years, the question of whether it can facilitate creativity remains largely unexplored. Moreover, despite the evidence linking multicultural experiences and global identities, migrant populations have been overly underrepresented in this area of research. We examine the association between global culture identification and creativity in the Alternate Uses Test, across two different samples residing in Spain: (...) a host national and majorly student sample and a culturally diverse immigrant sample. Additionally, we test the predictive value of ethnic identification and host culture identification. Regression analyses reveal that global culture identification positively predicts creativity among host national participants, and host culture identification predicts creativity among immigrant participants. Our results suggest that developing a cultural identity that transcends the one acquired through enculturation has the potential of facilitating creative behavior. (shrink)

Many traditional theories of creativity put heavy emphasis on an incubation stage in creative cognitive processes. The basic phenomenon is a familiar one: we are working on a task or problem, we leave it aside for some period of time, and when we return attention to the task we have some new insight that services completion of the task. This feature, combined with other ostensibly mysterious features of creativity, has discouraged naturalists from theorizing creativity. This avoidance is misguided: we can (...) maintain unconscious incubated cognition as (sometimes) part of the creative process and we can explain it in scientifically responsible ways. This paper, focusing on the effects of attention on the functional networking of the brain, attempts just such an explanation. It also serves to assuage the naturalist's scepticism about other features of creative cognition. The broad upshot, one would hope, is that philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists return some attention to the long neglected topic of creativity. (shrink)

This article relates the work of André Leroi-Gourhan and mostly his two-volume ok Le geste et la parole to art theory. More specifically, it is concerned with central debates on artistic creativity and examines how Leroi-Gourhan can contribute to them. After presenting some general premises of Leroi-Gourhan’s work (I), its second part (II) argues that his theory on ›rhythms‹ supplies valuable insights to the debate of Kunstwollen and materialism. The third part (III) discusses his work within the debate of industrialization (...) and audiovisual culture as opposed to manual and artisanal creativity. The fourth part (IV) links Leroi-Gourhan’s conclusions on perception and digitality with some aspects of contemporary art theory. On the whole, this article argues that Leroi-Gourhans’s work provides flexible analytical tools in order to think art history and human evolution in conjunction, as well as a specifi c framework for examining creativity within the general cultural and technological shifts after the modern age. The conclusions of this essay shed some light on Leroi-Gourhan’s theories on art and offer some methodological perspectives to contemporary artistic theory. (shrink)

Counselors ask their clients to become creative in their personal lives and within their counseling process. The process of counseling is a creative process. Growth is necessary for effective improvement in the counseling process. This paper will examine creativity from the point of view of the affective experience of the creator, and the relationship of this experience to the client in counseling. The position here is that the process of counseling is both a creative process and one that involves tensions (...) and turbulence. Based on a model of nonlinear dynamics, and ideas about the creative process, this study draws a dynamical fractal movie of the counseling process in which the counselor serves as an attractor for the construction of opposites in the client behavior that allow for growth and the construction of a new state of psychosocial events. (shrink)

The article is devoted to problems of creative and reproductive strategies of modern Russian pedagogy with regard to the asynchrony of cultural personality layers of students. The asynchrony of cultural and psychological personality layers means that a system of personal attitudes consists of orientations that prevailed in different historical periods and therefore is able to combine both harmony and disharmony of interaction between them. Orientation on the reproduction or on the creativity has a particularly strong influence on the formation and (...) dominance over private personal attitudes. Special attention is paid to active group learning methods that are capable of intensifying the creative development of a personality. The cause of many of the shortcomings of the modern education is the state bureaucratic activity armed of consolidating the archaic reproductive attitudes in teachers and students practices and at enhancing the asynchrony of cultural layers of personality, which hampers the further development of creativity. Much attention is paid to the traditions of Russian humanitarian thought and experience of outstanding Russian teachers largely determined the development of modern pedagogical practice. The activity of the most talented native teachers of the twentieth century was aimed at reducing the specified cultural asynchrony of pupils through active intragroup interaction with increasing inclusion of each in the process of development of modern cultural skills of creativity. Not ‘stucking‘ on the tasks that the group could decide for herself, the teacher worked "for the future", focusing it on the broader educational interests and creativity. Typology of culture correlates with cognitive mechanisms of socialization. (shrink)

This paper questions the notion of creativity found in certain artworks produced with A.I. technologies. The artistic examples concerned are: The Giver of names by David Rokeby, Oscar by Catherine Ikam and Louis Fléri, and Emotion Vending Machine by Maurice Benayoun. These artworks were selected because they stand out for their autonomous behavior in front of the human public. In this context, creativity is revealed as a consequence of the functional autonomy, which is very typical of these pieces of art. (...) The intention is to establish a relationship between the notion of autonomy and that of creativity, reviewing their meanings and applications in philosophy and in the field of life science. (shrink)

The capacity to be creative, to produce new concepts, ideas, inventions, objects or art, is perhaps the most important attribute of the human brain. We know very little, however, about the nature of creativity or its neural basis. Some important questions include how should we define creativity? How is it related (or unrelated) to high intelligence? What psychological processes or environmental circumstance cause creative insights to occur? How is it related to conscious and unconscious processes? What is happening at the (...) neural level during moments of creativity? How is it related to health or illness, and especially mental illness? This paper will review introspective accounts from highly creative individuals. These accounts suggest that unconscious processes play an important role in achieving creative insights. Neuroimaging studies of the brain during "REST" (random episodic silent thought, also referred to as the default state) suggest that the association cortices are the primary areas that are active during this state and that the brain is spontaneously reorganising and acting as a self-organising system. Neuroimaging studies also suggest that highly creative individuals have more intense activity in association cortices when performing tasks that challenge them to "make associations." Studies of creative individuals also indicate that they have a higher rate of mental illness than a noncreative comparison group, as well as a higher rate of both creativity and mental illness in their first-degree relatives. This raises interesting questions about the relationship between the nature of the unconscious, the unconscious and the predisposition to both creativity and mental illness. (shrink)

A corporate culture strengthened by ethical values and other positive business practices likely yields more favorable employee work responses. Thus, the purpose of this study was to assess the degree to which perceived corporate ethical values work in concert with group creativity to influence both job satisfaction and turnover intention. Using a self-report questionnaire, information was collected from 781 healthcare and administrative employees working at a multi-campus education-based healthcare organization. Additional survey data was collected from a comparative convenience sample of (...) 127 sales and marketing employees working for a variety of firms operating in the south-central United States. The results indicated that group creativity and corporate ethical values were positively related, and that both variables were associated with increased job satisfaction. Conversely, corporate ethical values and job satisfaction were associated with decreased turnover intention. Sales managers should create work cultures that precipitate increased ethical values and group creativity, and suggestions about how they may institutionalize these factors are provided. (shrink)

This study explores Honoré de Balzac’s iconic representation of artistic creativity in The Unknown Masterpiece by focusing on an unexamined aspect of his text, namely the seminal role played by critical reception and consumption in artistic production. This influential tale is examined in terms of its artistic and philosophical contributions to reenvisioning creativity by modern and postmodern critics and thinkers. Challenging the ideology of the artist as creative genius, this analysis targets the processes, labor and materials of artistic production and (...) its relations to critical consumption. At issue is the expressive potential of the art work in its creative capacities to bring about the new, to happen and make things happen. (shrink)

This review presents an analysis of the fundamental work “Creativity and religiosity in Russian culture. Philosophical Research” was written by the Russian philosopher and cultural scientist O.A. Zhukova who has been fruitfully researching the history of Russian culture and national thought for many years. The new book is the third part of a trilogy devoted to discussing the line of succession in Russian cultural and intellectual history, which is characterized by a religious understanding of creativity. The author formulates important theoretical (...) positions, as well as methodological approaches to the study in philosophy of Russian culture and history. The large scale work is highlighted by the original interpretation of the plots considered in it. In the book, O.A. Zhukova develops the thesis about the ideal-centering of Russian culture, she offers a philosophical-culturological model of the historical dynamics of Russian culture. The basis of this model is the creative experience of a personality. (shrink)

The article confronts Cornelius Castoriadis's philosophy of 'the imaginary institution of society' with issues of innovation in a knowledge society and outlines a new notion of innovation as creative organization. It will take a critical approach to innovation from a historical perspective of postwar systems theory and introduce Castoriadis's philosophy as an interesting option in this regard. It proceeds in four parts: (a) First, it debates the limits of the commonplace metaphor of diffusion and adoption in today's debate on innovation. (...) (b) Second, it will present aspects of Castoriadis's thought as an alternative, in particular his debate on imagination and the proto-institution of legein/teukhein — ordered action. (c) On this background it will treat a case from the Danish innovation industry, the firm Zentropa WorkZ's programme of 'Dramatic Innovation' as an interesting example of an innovation format addressing creativity. (d) In conclusion, it will briefly debate creative knowledge formation in a knowledge society by pondering relations between innovation and current science. (shrink)

A qualitatively new, much more liberal and efficient organisation of science is proposed and justified in connection with emerging international science structures, such as the European Research Council, and growing debates about further role and development of fundamental science. Although the ideas are expressed in terms of "common sense" arguments accessible to a "general" audience, they are based on the rigorous analysis within the recently advanced "universal concept of complexity", which can be applied, due to its universality, also to science (...) structure itself considered as a complex system. We demonstrate thus the application of this ultimate criterion of completeness of a system of knowledge (and viability of related intelligence) that should be able to derive consistent, provable, and practically relevant conclusions about its own purpose, sense, evolution, and current state. (shrink)