Imagination and Creative Thinking

by Amy Kind

This Element explores the nature of both imagination and creative thinking in an effort to understand the relation between them and also to understand their role in the vast array of activities in which they are typically implicated, from art, music, and literature to technology, medicine, and science. Focusing on the contemporary philosophical literature, it will take up several interrelated What is imagination, and how does it fit into the cognitive architecture of the mind? What is creativity? Is imagination required for creativity? Is creativity required for imagination? Is a person simply born either imaginative or not (and likewise, either creative or not), or are imagination and creativity skills that can be cultivated? And finally, are imagination and creativity uniquely human capacities, or can they be had by nonbiological entities such as AI systems?

Genres: Philosophy

70 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 28, 2022

Reviews

[Allan Olley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an introduction to the academic philosophy of Imagination and Creative Thinking. It spends much of the time discussing some definitions and criterion for imagination and its relation to creativity that have been proposed recently. It also connects these debates to debates about attempts to produce creative works via various forms of artificial intelligence.

The book is an interesting take on this issue with some good writing and solid references such as the invocation of Through The Looking Glass and the Queen who will believe 6 impossible things before breakfast to discuss the voluntariness of imagination versus belief. Also while it does connect these ideas to issues in Artificial Intelligence, it does not dwell in great depth upon them preferring to focus on questions like whether the imaginative faculty can be trained.

The pdf for this that I read it from is legible and seems to have all the pages etc.

[José Pereira · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating, acutely topical and imminently philosophical topic surveyed with precision and clarity.
It is in the nature of this collection to be concise, but a lot is left to be said, however; including some of the issues I was most curious about. A lot more could’ve been said on the specific logics of the different forms of creative thought/processing. If we are to say anything on AI creativity, we need a strong understanding of combinatorial and transformative creation in humans. Kind doesn't give us much in the way of that.
It also seems fundamental - in order, for example, to better understand scientific breakthroughs - to have a firmer grasp on what constitutes and makes possible greater (in degree) leaps in and states of creativity. I didn't find that here either.