Research Seminar: 'Creativity, Virtue and Empirical Challenges'
Prof Matthew Kieran (Leeds)
Refectory Lounge
About the event
Event type: Seminar
We praise and admire those who do things creatively from cooking, art and design to producing imaginative experiments, theories and feats of engineering. We also sometimes blame or withhold praise from those who fail creatively. We might say that a design is derivative, someone’s ideas are pedestrian or a sports team uninspired.
Societies often seek to enable individual creativity, partly because doing so is held to be good for the individual as well as promoting wider socio-economic goods. This paper will outline a conception of creativity and a virtue theoretic account of creative excellence that makes sense of how and why we think in this way.
Once the view is laid out the rest of the paper will be devoted to considering objections to this account emerging from the psychological and philosophical literature: challenges based on claims concerning natural talent, ill-being and immorality.