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Creativity, Virtue and the Challenges from Natural Talent, Ill-Being and Immorality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 October 2014

Matthew Kieran
Matthew Kieran*
Affiliation:
University of [email protected]
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Extract

We praise and admire creative people in virtually every domain from the worlds of art, fashion and design to the fields of engineering and scientific endeavour. Picasso was one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, Einstein was a creative scientist and Jonathan Ive is admired the world over as a great designer. We also sometimes blame, condemn or withhold praise from those who fail creatively; hence we might say that someone's work or ideas tend to be rather derivative and uninspired. Institutions and governmental advisory bodies sometimes aspire, claim or exhort us to enable individual creativity, whether this is held to be good for the individual as such or in virtue of promoting wider socio-economic goods. It is at least a common thought that people are more self-fulfilled if they are creative and society more generally is held to be all the better for enabling individual creativity.

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Papers
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Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 75: Philosophical Aesthetics and the Sciences of Art , October 2014 , pp. 203 - 230
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2014 

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References

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57 I would like to thank in particular Matthew Broome, Gregory Currie, Dominic Lopes, James MacCabe, Sam Wren-Lewis and audiences at the Inter-University Center, Dubrovnik, University of British Columbia, University of Hertfordshire, University of Nanterre–Paris X and the RIP ‘Philosophical Aesthetics and the Sciences of Art?’ conference, Leeds, for valuable critical comments and discussion. Grateful acknowledgement is made to the AHRC ‘Method in Philosophical Aesthetics: the Challenge from the Sciences’ project and the Leverhulme Trust.