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. The Philosophy of Creativity takes up these questions and, in doing so, illustrates the value of interdisciplinary exchange.

Creativity matters. We want people to be more creative and admire those who are. Yet creativity is deeply puzzling. Just what is it to be creative? Why is it valuable? Who or what can be creative and how? Creativity and Philosophy is an outstanding collection of specially commissioned chapters by leading philosophers who explore these problems and many more. It provides a comprehensive and creative picture of creativity, including the following themes: creativity as a virtue, imagination, epistemic virtue, moral virtue and personal vice; creativity with and without value, the definition of creativity, creative failures and suffering; creativity in nature, divine creativity and human agency; naturalistic explanations of creativity and the extended mind; creativity in philosophy, mathematics and logic, and the role of heuristics; creativity in art, morality and politics; individual and group creativity. A major feature of the collection is that it explores creativity not only from the perspective of art and aesthetics, but also from a variety of philosophical disciplines, including epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, philosophy of science, political philosophy and ethics. The volume is essential reading for anyone fascinated by creativity, whether their interests lie in philosophy, music, art and visual studies, literature, psychology, neuroscience, management or education, or they are simply intent on learning more about this vital human trait.

Philosophical reflections on creativity in science, humanities, and human experience as a whole. In this philosophical exploration of creativity, Irving Singer describes the many different types of creativity and their varied manifestations within and across all the arts and sciences. Singer's approach is pluralistic rather than abstract or dogmatic. His reflections amplify recent discoveries in cognitive science and neurobiology by aligning them with the aesthetic, affective, and phenomenological framework of experience and behavior that characterizes the human quest for meaning. Creativity has long fascinated Singer, and in Modes of Creativity he carries forward investigations begun in earlier works. Marshaling a wealth of examples and anecdotes ranging from antiquity to the present, about persons as diverse as Albert Einstein and Sherlock Holmes, Singer describes the interactions of the creative and the imaginative, the inventive, the novel, and the original. He maintains that our preoccupation with creativity devolves from biological, psychological, and social bases of our material being; that creativity is not limited to any single aspect of human existence but rather inheres not only in art and the aesthetic but also in science, technology, moral practice, as well as ordinary daily experience.

Science is usually knownbyits most successful figures and resource-rich institutions. In stark contrast, Creativity from the Peripherydraws our attention to unknown figures in science—those who remain marginalized, even neglected, within its practices. Researchers in early twentieth-century colonial India, for example, have made significant contributions to the stock of scientific knowledge and have provided science with new breakthroughs and novel ideas, but to little acclaim. As Deepanwita Dasgupta argues, sometimes the best ideas in science are born from difficult and resource-poor conditions. Inthis study,she turns our attention to these peripheral actors, shedding new light on how scientific creativity operates in lesser-known, marginalized contexts, and how the work of self-trained researchers, though largely ignored , has contributed to important conceptual shifts. Her book presents a new philosophical framework for understanding this peripheral creativity in science through the lens of trading zones—where knowledge is exchanged between two unequal communities—and explores the implications for the future diversity of transnational science.

First Published in 2012. The Philosophy of MetaReality: creativity, love and freedom is the third of three books elaborating Roy Bhaskar’s philosophy of metaReality, which appeared in rapid succession in 2002. A big, rich book teaming with ideas, The Philosophy of MetaReality is undoubtedly the magnum opus of Bhaskar’s spiritual turn. Building on a radical new analysis of the self, human agency and society, Roy Bhaskar shows how the world of alienation and crisis we currently inhabit is sustained by the ground-state qualities of intelligence, creativity, love, a capacity for right-action and a potential for human self-realisation or fulfilment. A new introduction to this edition by Mervyn Hartwig, founding editor of Journal of Critical Realism and editor of A Dictionary of Critical Realism (Routledge, 2007), describes the context, significance and impact of the philosophy of metaReality, and supplies an expert guide to its content. This book is essential reading for students and practitioners of both philosophy and the human sciences.

Creativity, Psychology, and the History of Science offers for the first time a comprehensive overview of the oeuvre of Howard E. Gruber, who is noted for his contributions both to the psychology of creativity and to the history of science. The present book includes papers from a wide range of topics. In the contributions to creativity research, Gruber proposes his key ideas for studying creative work. Gruber focuses on how the thinking, motivation and affect of extraordinarily creative individuals evolve and how they interact over long periods of time. Gruber’s approach bridges many disciplines and subdisciplines in psychology and beyond, several of which are represented in the present volume: cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, history of science, aesthetics, and politics. The volume thus presents a unique and comprehensive contribution to our understanding of the creative process. Many of Gruber's papers have not previously been easily accessible; they are presented here in thoroughly revised form.

"The reader will find that I combine hearty enthusiasm for the philosophical traditions of my country with sharp partial disagreement with nearly all their representatives. My effort throughout my career has been to think about philosophical, that is, essentially a priori or metaphysical, issues, using the history of ideas as a primary resource. "This is the second of two volumes dealing with the history of philosophy, especially of metaphysics. The first, Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers, discusses some thirty European philosophers, from Democritus to Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty. In both volumes I try to learn and teach truth about reality by arguing, in a fashion, with those who in the past have sought such truth." — Charles Hartshorne In a remarkable tour de force, Charles Hartshorne presents a lively and illuminating study of what major American philosophers have said about creativity. With a special talent for perceiving and elegantly expressing the essence of a position, Dr. Hartshorne details his reactions to friend and foe, demonstrating that philosophy at its best is dialogue. Noting that metaphysics is a major theme in the American philosophical tradition, he states that "nowhere has the topic been more persistently and searchingly investigated than in this country."