"Creativity as Strategy", Dr Adrian Currie (University of Exeter)

Egenis seminar series. Against most philosophers who are interested in creativity, I think there is good reason to want an account of creativity that doesn’t tie it to agents or individuals. First, the arguments for tying creativity to agenthood are based on unstable, historically contingent intuitions which are a bad basis for analysis. Second, if creativity is importantly linked to knowledge-production, and knowledge-production is best thought of as a population-level phenomena, then we should develop ways of understanding creativity at the population-level. Third, some arguments for human exceptionalism turn on our capacity to be creative, and I suspect our ability to articulate and critique such positions are marred if we cannot get a non-anthropocentric grip on creativity in the first place: decoupling creativity from agenthood is one way of doing this. In light of this, I present an account of creativity which is non-agential and non-purposeful but, I think, both deserves to be named creativity and sheds light on arguments for human exceptionalism.