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

In Moral Knowledge?: New Readings in Moral Epistemology, editors Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Mark Timmons bring together eleven newly written essays by distinguished moral philosophers exploring the nature and possibility of moral knowledge. Each essay represents a major position within the exciting field of moral epistemology in which a proponent of the position presents and defends his or her view and locates it vis-a-vis competing views. The first chapter, written by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, provides a framework for understanding the basic concepts and (...) viewpoints in moral epistemology and presents a limited skeptical challenge to the justification of moral beliefs. The following essays represent various options in response to moral skepticism. Peter Railton and Simon Blackburn take different stances on moral truth and realism, Robert Audi defends a version of intuitionism, and Geoffrey Sayre-McCord adopts coherentism, while R.M. Hare combines elements of both foundationalism and coherentism. Richard Brandt discusses the relevance of empirical science to moral knowledge, Christopher Morris develops a contractarian account of moral justification, and David Copp bases moral knowledge on rational choices by societies. Margaret Urban Walker aruges for a feminist perspective on moral knowledge, and Mark Timmons expounds contextualism in moral epistemology. The lively and clear selections do not presuppose specialized knowledge of philosophy, and the philosophical vocabulary used throughout the anthology is uniform, in order to facilitate understanding by those not familiar with the field. The first chapter includes a sustained critical discussion of the major views represented in the following chapters, thereby furnishing beginning students with appropriate background to understand the selections. The volume is further enhanced by an index and an extensive bibliography, which is divided into sections corresponding to the chapters of the book. Moral Knowledge provides the most up-to-date work on moral knowledge and justification and serves as an excellent text for undergraduate and graduate courses. (shrink)

First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Life in Groups: How We Think, Feel, and Act Together comprises thirteen essays by the author relating to human life in groups, together with a substantial introduction and concluding discussion. The essays continue the development and application of the author’s perspective on collective beliefs, emotions, and actions, arguing that these and other central social phenomena are grounded in a joint commitment of the parties. This commitment unifies them, guides their actions going forward, and determines their relations to one another in (...) important ways. In particular, it grounds in each of the parties a set of rights and obligations of a particular kind. The introduction serves both to introduce joint commitment to those unfamiliar with it and to advance discussion in light of questions that have been raised. Several of the essays respond to comments on particular aspects of the author’s work. These include an essay that addresses some central questions about a joint commitment approach to the problem of political obligation. (shrink)

Typical agreements can be seen as joint decisions, inherently involving obligations of a distinctive kind. These obligations derive from the joint commitment' that underlies a joint decision. One consequence of this understanding of agreements and their obligations is that coerced agreements are possible and impose obligations. It is not that the parties to an agreement should always conform to it, all things considered. Unless one is released from the agreement, however, one has some reason to conform to it, whatever else (...) is true. In this sense, one is under an obligation to the other parties. The relevance of these points to the issue of political obligation is discussed. (shrink)

The moral expertise of clinical ethicists is not a question of mastering codelike theories and lawlike principles. Rather, ethicists are architects of moral space within the health care setting, as well as mediators in the conversations taking place within that space.

What is a crip politics of bodymind? Drawing upon Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's theory of the misfit, I explain my understanding of crip and bodymind within a feminist materialist framework, and argue that careful investigation of a crip politics of bodymind must involve accounting for two key, but under-explored, disability studies concepts: desire and pain. I trace the turn toward desire that has characterized DS theory for the last decade, and argue that while acknowledging disability desire, we must also attend to the (...) aspects of disability, including pain, that are sometimes bad. Although I don't argue that pain is always and only bad, I call for recognition of the ways pain complicates disability desire, as well as the possibilities it opens for specifically located, collective forms of care. (shrink)

Work on representing women's voices in ethics has produced a vision of moral understanding profoundly subversive of the traditional philosophical conception of moral knowledge. 1 explicate this alternative moral “epistemology,” identify how it challenges the prevailing view, and indicate some of its resources for a liberatory feminist critique of philosophical ethics.

This is how A. John Simmons sets the scene for his discussion of political obligation in his book Moral Principles and Political Obligations, one of the best known contemporary philosophical treatments of the subject.

: International instruments now defend a "right to the truth " for victims of political repression and violence and include truth telling about human rights violations as a kind of reparation as well as a form of redress. While truth telling about violations is obviously a condition of redress or repair for violations, it may not be clear how truth telling itself is a kind of reparations. By showing that concerted truth telling can satisfy four features of suitable reparations vehicles, (...) I defend the idea that politically implemented modes of truth telling to, for, and by those who are victims of gross violation and injustice may with good reason be counted as a kind of reparations. Understanding the doubly symbolic character of reparations, however, makes clearer why truth telling is unlikely to be sufficient reparation for serious wrongs and is likely to be sensitive to the larger context of reparative activity and its social, political, and historical background. (shrink)

Background The ethical use both of human and non-human animals in research is predicated on the assumption that it is of a high quality and its projected benefits are more significant than the risks and harms imposed on subjects. Yet questions remain about whether and how IRBs and IACUCs should consider the scientific value of proposed research studies.Methods We draw upon 45 interviews with IRB and IACUC members and researchers with oversight experience about their perceptions of their own roles in (...) reviewing the quality and value of scientific protocols. Interview transcripts were memoed to highlight specific findings, which were then used to identify key themes through an iterative process.Results IRB and IACUC members expressed broad trust in the need for and value of research, and they often assumed that protocols had social value or that prior review, especially when associated with funding, affirmed both the rigor and merit of those protocols. Some oversight members also took an explicit stance against scientific review by stating that such review is not within the regulatory mandates governing their parts in the oversight system. Yet other interviewees expressed uneasiness about the current paradigm for evaluating the quality and overall value of science, suggesting that IRB and IACUC members perceive gaps in the oversight systems.Conclusions These findings reveal many similarities in how IRB and IACUC members understand the roles and limitations of their respective oversight committees. We conclude with a discussion of how the lack of a clear mandate regarding scientific review within US federal regulations may undermine ethical engagement of whether human and animal research is scientifically justified, resulting in a “mission lapse” wherein no organizational body is clearly responsible for ensuring that the research being conducted has the potential to advance science and benefit society. (shrink)

This collection reconsiders canonical figures and the formation of disciplinary boundaries during the Scientific Revolution.

The Radical Enlightenment has been much discussed and its original meaning somewhat distorted. In 1981 my concept of the storm that unleashed a new, transnational intellectual movement possessed a strong contextual and political element that I believed, and still believe, to be critically important. Idealist accounts of enlightened ideas that divorce them from politics leave out the lived quality of the new radicalism born in reaction to monarchical and clerical absolutism. Taking the religious impulse seriously and working to defang it (...) of bellicosity would require years of labor. First all the world’s religions had to be surveyed, see Picart’s seven folio volumes; and Rousseau’s Savoyard vicar had to both preach and live religion simply as true virtue; and finally Jefferson editing the Bible so as to get the irrational parts simply removed, thus making people more fit to grant a complete religious toleration. Throughout the century all these approaches to revealed religion may be legitimately described as radical. Each produced a different recommendation for its replacement. As I have now come to see, the pantheism I identified in 1981 would lead in many directions, among them lay the search to understand all human religiosity and to articulate a universal natural religion. (shrink)

In a recent series of papers, Matthias Steup has defended doxastic voluntarism against longstanding objections. Many of his arguments center on the following conditional: if we accept a compatibilist notion of voluntary control, then, in most instances, belief-formation is voluntary and doxastic voluntarism the correct view. Steup defends two versions of this conditional. The first is universal, moving from compatibilism considered generally to doxastic voluntarism: if compatibilism is true, then doxastic voluntarism is true. The second is more particular, moving from (...) the specific form of reasons-responsive compatibilism to doxastic voluntarism: if reasons-responsive compatibilism is true, then doxastic voluntarism is true. I argue that Steup’s arguments for both conditionals fail, in which case we lack reason to believe in either of them. In the final section of the paper, I argue that the impossibility of epistemic akrasia provides prima facie reason to think the latter conditional is false. (shrink)

An introduction to paradoxes showing that they are more than mere puzzles but can prompt new ways of thinking.

This chapter explains Descartes confusion on sensations, size, shape, position, and motion. Descartes in detail explains that we perceive particular figures or actual bodies affecting our senses much more distinctly than their colours. Descartes construe the perception of position, distance, size, and shape as involving strong intellectual elements and he holds that they differ in this fundamental respect from ordinary perceptions of color, sound, heat and cold, taste, and the like, which are said to consist just in having “sensations” that (...) “arise from the mind-body union.” This position leaves room for uncertainty about what he means when he speaks elsewhere of the near-uselessness of sense perceptions in informing us of particular qualities of bodies, in so far as it opens the possibility of a quite restricted understanding of “sense perception” in these contexts. (shrink)

I propose a novel account of the essentially expressive nature of reparations. My account is descriptive of new practices of reparations that have emerged in the past half-century, and it provides normative guidance on conditions of success for reparative attempts. My account attributes to reparative attempts a dual expressive function: a communicative function that requires the gesture to carry a vindicatory message to victims; and an exemplifying function that requires the gesture to model the right relationship that was absent or (...) violated in the wrongdoing to which reparations respond. This account is able to explain the breadth and variety of measures now recognized as reparations; how reparative attempts can fail in two distinct ways; and why material compensation is never sufficient and not always necessary to reparations. (shrink)

Social scientists have investigated many facets of popular music over the last 25 years. The vast majority of their efforts have focused on men and their contributions to the creation and performance of popular music. As a result, we know little about women and their experiences as musicians in a traditionally male-centered and male-dominated activity. In this study, the authors used in-depth interviews with 15 local-level female rock and roll musicians in two U.S. cities to explore audiences' reactions and responses (...) to them as performers and their interactions with other band members. (shrink)

Helen's self-disparagement is an anomaly in epic diction, and this is especially true of those instances where she refers to herself as "dog" and "dog-face." This essay attempts to show that Helen's dog-language, in that it remains in conflict with other features of her characterization, has some generic significance for epic, helping to establish the superiority of epic performance over competing performance types which treated her differently. The metaphoric use of χύων and its derivatives has not been well understood: the (...) scholiast's gloss "shameless" is no more than a functional equivalent, and interpretations linking it primarily with reckless courage or with sexual misconduct are not well founded. An analysis of contexts suggests that "dog" as an insult has a fundamental association with physical greed and even cannibalism. The implied notion of avarice, however, may also be extended into other behavioral spheres, including those of fighting and sexuality. A character may also be called "dog" for reviling or slandering another unjustly. These strongly negative implications are out of keeping with the character given to Helen in epic. For where tragedy and lyric generally represent Helen as blameworthy, Homeric epic tends to absolve her of blame and to make her personally as well as physically attractive. The unexpected application of dog-terms to her may therefore be read as an allusion to other versions of the Troy legend which were more hostile to Helen. Negative portrayals of Helen are likely to have figured in the ancient kitharodic narrative which was a precursor of both tragedy and lyric; these are perhaps the unfriendly "songs" mentioned by Helen at Il. 6.357. By referring to such defamatory narratives through the dog-insult and through other instances of Helen's self-blame, the epic performer marks his own more favorable treatment as a generic preference. (shrink)

The influence of Napoleon Bonaparte on the Ecole Polytechnique has long been a matter for debate. In this article, the extent of this influence is illustrated, together with resistance within the school itself to Napoleon's attempts to bend it to his own will and use it for purposes of military adventure. Manuscript material, including Napoleon's own private plans for the reorganization of the school, is reproduced to throw light on his intentions and his own attitudes to education.

New technologies are changing our lives radically and quickly. New biotechnologies are moving to commercial uses faster than government regulators or private citizens can monitor. This tension manifests itself in the current debates over xenotransplantation technologies in medicine. The possibility of removing cells, tissues, and organs from animals and transplanting them into human beings is startling and unnerving. Natural immunesystem barriers between species, and even between individuals within a species, are formidable. Typically, transplantation results in violent rejection and death of (...) the grafted organ. But despite the natural barriers to transplantation, xenotransplantation aims specifically to overcome them.In this paper, I will discuss applications of xenograft technology, which raises clinical risks, ethical concerns, and policy issues. I conclude with a set of specific recommendations. As a recent letter to the journal Nature puts it, there is a “split between those who want to get it right, and those who want to get it right now.” No one knows what all the risks, benefits, and unintended consequences of xenotransplantation will be. (shrink)