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A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry into Human Creativity

Mission an vision

Human work – science, technology, craft, the arts, industry, social work, etc. – is the milieu where the active role of humanity in creation produces concrete consequences. According to some approaches (mainly, but not only, in psychology and some sectors of philosophy), creativity is regarded as a faculty of the person, stemming from aspects of the character and/or cognitive attitudes. The notion of innovation is often used to indicate the outcomes of creative processes which receive social acceptance and thus stabilize and spread in a given social context.
In this line, an innovation is such because of its social relevance. A further level is reached when an innovation acquires relevance not only in reference to a social context, but for reality as such: it is here that human creativity acquires its fully ontological import. Creativity, hence, makes humanity God’s effective collaborator (the created co-creator): it ensures real novelty and growth.

Our aim

We have the aim to contribute an encompassing and interdisciplinary theory of human creativity relevant in natural, human, philosophical and theological sciences. Our objective is to show how creativity is an essential character of the human being. Several disciplines unveil different, apparently disconnected aspects of creativity. However, all these aspects can, and should, be framed in a unified and synthetic view. Thus, the aim of this project is to build (or contribute to) such a synthesis, centered on the notion that the human being is the subject of its own flourishing (both individually and collectively) and of the development of the world’s potentialities. 

Focusing our research on creativity also has a strategic value in advocating human uniqueness in the contemporary research milieu. Indeed, human creativity can nowadays be better pursued by “contrasting” it with animal cognition and artificial intelligence, as well as with our ancestors’ historical and prehistoric creative outcomes. Such comparisons will put to test the mentioned means/ends working hypothesis:

Can other life forms or artificial systems creatively elaborate new ends, or are they bound to devise novel means only?

 

 

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