Creativity pervades nearly everything we do; from an original, personalized card made for Grandma to the expressive cello gestures of a world-renowned cellist. Psychologists are unraveling the mysteries of creativity by researching such questions as: What are creative people like? What are the stages of the creative process? What aspects of perception allow us to recognize creative products? What role does the zeitgeist play in sculpting genius? Not that far away, Philosophers are pondering questions that could be applied to creativity, such as: What is creativity? What is the value of creativity; is it intrinsically valuable? How is it that creativity can be manifest in discovery as well as invention, in science as well as art? To what extent is creativity a social phenomenon? What is the creative experience like? What role does luck play in fashioning a creative product? These questions raise even more questions, such as: What role does agency play in creativity? Does creativity have free will? Is consciousness a necessary component of creativity? How should we understand the credit and praise we give to creative people? Even though these philosophical questions are important, Creativity is oddly missing among the central topics of philosophy. It’s odd because creativity plays such a vital role in shaping the human experience- as a mark of individuality, as an object of praise, and as the engine of progress in art, science, and philosophy itself. We hope this conference, and our stellar line-up of philosophers, psychologists, artists, and musicians will stimulate this underdeveloped field and bridge connections while also generating new philosophical and research topics that can get us closer to understand the magnificence of creativity.

EVENT DESCRIPTION: Choreographer, multi-media artist, and Artistic Director of jill sigman/thinkdance, Jill Sigman will discuss her work in dance and hybrid performance, reflecting on features of her own creative process. She will elucidate the what and why of making work that approaches the borders between disciplines and questions the roles of viewers and spaces. Sigman will present key examples from her creative projects, and follow the stories of their development so as to reveal aspects of her creative process and raise questions about creativity in general. Trained in classical ballet, postmodern dance, analytic philosophy, and the visual arts, Sigman makes work that activates spaces from industrial sites to a cheetos-filled cart, and asks viewers to write on eggshells, use their cell phones, or wear Superman T-shirts during performance. She is currently working on a project that explores themes of sustainability and apocalypse through huts built of found and re-purposed materials.

BIO: Jill Sigman asks questions through the medium of the body. Trained in classical ballet, modern dance, improvisation, and visual art, Sigman has been making dances and performance installations since the early 90s. In 1998, she founded her New York based dance company jill sigman/thinkdance as a vehicle for her performance experiments. In the same year she received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University. Equally comfortable on a proscenium stage or crawling in the dirt armed with fluorescent waterguns, Sigman transforms deceptively simple actions into explorations of politics, gender, and society; her work currently exists at the intersection of dance, theater, and visual installation. Sigman’s work has been produced by such New York City venues as Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project, PS 1 Contemporary Art Center, and the 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Center, and has been seen in theaters, green spaces, bus stations, and industrial dead ends. Internationally, her work has been shown in Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Croatia, Hungary, Slovenia, and India. As a teacher, Sigman offers workshops nationally at colleges and universities; she has been a a movement tutor at the Imaginary Academy in Groznjan, Croatia, a frequent guest teacher in Belgium, a professor of aesthetics and performance theory at Brooklyn College and The New School, and a guest artist at Hofstra University. She has recently been teaching in Oslo, Norway, and is currently at work on a multi-site project about huts and sustainable living. See: www.thinkdance.org /

This article will explore a range of audience activities through which audiences co-create artworks. The author will discuss these activities in terms of the play of imagination, however, rather than treat the imagination as if it were a single monolithic phenomenon. He will attempt to identify and analyze several different imaginative activities that are engaged in response to a variety of artworks. Paper

Most theorists assume that creativity requires both novelty of ideas, behavior, or products, as well as a positive value attaching to those ideas, behavior, or products. However, philosophers like Boden have drawn a distinction between historical creativity (where the novelty is relative to an entire society or historical tradition) and psychological creativity (where the novelty is relative to a single individual). It is fair to say that most of the interest in creativity on the part of philosophers (and to a lesser extent cognitive scientists) is in the former. People care especially about the sorts of creativity that result in great art, great literature, or in great science. However, historical creativity, which is uniquely human, must always also manifest psychological creativity, which is not uniquely human. Our interest in this chapter is in the developmental and evolutionary precursors of creativity in either of the above senses, with the aim of understanding the characteristics of uniquely human creativity that permit historical creativity.

It is possible to introduce further distinctions among forms of creativity by relativizing the value-component in the above definitions to a particular individual as well, or by dropping it altogether. The former would characterize ideas, behavior, or products that are both novel and valuable only from the perspective of a single individual. The latter would characterize ideas, behavior, or products that are simply novel from the perspective of the individual, irrespective of value. These further distinctions might help us to understand the emergence of distinctively-human creativity from animal and infant precursors. For there is reason to think that many animals engage in novel instances of behavior that are valuable to them as individuals, and thus engage in a form of psychological creativity. The kind of protean escape behavior displayed by many species of animal in escaping from a predator would be one type of example. The insight behavior of apes and corvids would be another. Moreover, one of us has argued that pretend play in human infancy is underlain by a tendency to find generating and entertaining psychologically novel suppositions intrinsically rewarding, regardless of whether such novel suppositions are valuable to them as individuals. The hypothesis that we propose to explore is that it is this disposition (that is, the generation of non-valuable novel thoughts and behavior) that forms the developmental basis of distinctively human forms of creativity. Ironically, humans wouldn’t be capable of valuable historical novelty if they didn’t first have a disposition to produce novelty for its own sake. Paper

The great creative artists who have given us narratives of fiction (literature, drama and film) are looked to for insight into the human condition. How often do we get it from them? A good deal less often than we generally think, or so I say. I offer a number of arguments for concluding that great works of narrative are bad places to look for enlightenment about the mind; I suggest that creative expression in art is, on the whole, at odds with the search for truth. I ask how our attitude to literature should change if we accept these arguments. Adapting some ideas of Richard Miller, I suggest we see the enterprise as one of pretend-learning. Paper

The aim of the paper is to argue that the difference between creative and non-creative mental processes is not a functional/computational, but an experiential one. In other words, what is distinctive about creative mental processes is not the functional/computational mechanism that leads to the emergence of a creative idea, be it the recombination of old ideas or the transformation of one’s conceptual space, but the way in which this mental process is experienced. The explanatory power of the functional/computational theories and the experiential account is compared and it is pointed out that if creativity is a natural kind, it is not a functional/computational, but an experiential natural kind. Paper

In a lecture format, exploring the overall theme of sound in contemporary art, digital media, and composition, Miller reconstructs the history of sound and recorded media by several of the most well known artists of their field - ranging from Brian Eno, Steve Reich, Moby, Chuck D, and Pierre Boulez, to artists, writers and theoreticians like Jonathan Lethem, Bruce Sterling, Manuel Delanda, and even Islamic culture's relationship to hip hop with essay by media activist and artist Naeem Mohaimen. In using the essays that are in Sound Unbound, Miller makes the lecture format a cross between a formal exploration of the issues Sound Unbound focused on, and the remix concept that drives much of the book. It's a rip-mix-burn-lecture. Rhythm Science author Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid asks artists to describe their work and compositional strategies in their own words. These are reports from the front lines on the role of sound and digital media in an information-based society. Miller's lecture will be an hour, and is accompanied by his use of many historic texts, rare audio recordings and films, to demonstrate the complex relationship between text and art in a multimedia context.

An old and popular idea is that the person I am is the person described by the truthful narrative of my life. Some say narrative is the essential genre of the self -- descriptively or psychologically normal, as well as normatively required by our forensic practices according to which we hold each other accountable for what we do, how we act, and so on. A new and popular idea, especially in cosmopolitan places, is that pretty much any aspect of the self is or involves a fair amount of performance, including how I do, create, or locate the story I tell myself and you about who and what I am. We hear of gender as performance, ethnicity as performance, social role as chosen and then done, executed, performed. This is the psychopoetic conception of personhood. In this talk I explore the psychopoetic conception of personhood and discuss its relation to the forensic-narrative conception & such questions as its bearing on matters of truth, authenticity, normative appraisal, elitism, and posturing.

Auguste Comte argued that the sciences could be arrayed in a hierarchical configuration. Other thinkers have developed this idea using various analytical considerations. In addition, some empirical studies have found some basis of organizing the main domains of creative achievement along a single dimension that encompasses the sciences, humanities, and the arts. This unidimensional configuration can be explicated in terms of the extent to which creativity in a given domain is contingent on a process of blind-variation and selective-retention (BVSR). The latter process was first proposed by Alexander Bain, William James, Karl Popper, and Donald T. Campbell, and has been more recently developed by Dean Keith Simonton. Furthermore, a creator’s dispositional traits and developmental experiences that support BVSR will correlate with the domain of achievement and the magnitude of achievement within the domain. Ironically, if the disciplinary hierarchy is thus interpreted as representing the degree of creativity required to make high-impact contributions, then the hierarchy must be inverted, the arts placed at the top and the hard sciences at the bottom. This inversion is consistent with Immanuel Kant’s conception of the contrast between scientific and artistic creativity. Paper

In this paper I first sketch the difference between 'divine madness' views of creativity, championed from Socrates to Coleridge, with a 'business as usual' model more in tune with contemporary cognitive science. Following Robert Weisberg I recount the reasons for scepticism about some of the more miraculous accounts of creativity. I then compare the 'business as usual' model with economic and Darwinian views of creativity, and conclude that there is no reason for modifying it. Finally I ruminate on the damage the Romantic theory of creativity does in art galleries and classrooms. Paper

ABOUT THE FILM: Once upon a time there was a world full of meaning, focused by exemplary figures in the form of gods and heroes, saints and sinners. How did we lose them, or, might they still be around, in the form of modern day masters, in fields like sports, music, craft and cooking. Are these masters able to inspire us and bring back a sense of wonder, possibly even of the sacred?

Join world renowned philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, along with a generation of philosophers he inspired, as they take us on a riveting journey of ideas, tackling some of the deepest philosophical issues of our time. In this enlightening trip, we learn what is unique about human beings that allows us to take the risks necessary to learn skills, and how an appreciation of mastery can help us recover a meaningful world. Travel to New Orleans to meet the Queen of Creole Cuisine, travel to Spain to meet the legendary poet and flamenco master Manuel Molina, and enter the world of Hiroshi Sakaguchi a Japanese master craftsman.

Humans acting at their best respond faster than they can think. They converse, experience ""flow"", ""play out of their heads"", and in general are responsive and receptive to the demands of their unique situation. Masters don't deliberate and reflect, but ""straight away do the appropriate thing at the appropriate time in the appropriate way."" Given that spontaneous actions can reveal people at their best, why is that today people feel that, in order to act well, they must always reflect and then, like a machine, choose the most rational response?

Being in the World is a celebration of human beings, and our ability, through the mastery of physical, intellectual and creative skills, to find meaning in the world around us. This film takes us on a gripping and surprising journey around the world meeting extraordinary people, showing how we go from following rules to proficiency, to becoming masters in the form artists, craftsmen, athletes, and, ultimately, unique human beings attuned to the sacred.

Trailer: www.beingintheworldmovie.com