Abstract

The aim of this paper is to give an account of the use of imagination at the core of artistic creative processes involving experiential imagination, and to show that this use of the imagination does not always lead to a creative output. Creative imagining is a value-guided process, where the values are essentially subjective in that they are given in the phenomenal aspects of experience or imagined experience. But creative imagining is neither sufficient nor necessary for artistic creative processes. It is not sufficient because creativity in other domains may involve value-guided experiential imagining, and it is not necessary because some art may be produced without the use of imagination, or in a manner that employs mostly other forms of imagination.