This paper seeks to answer the question: Can contemporary forms of artificial intelligence be creative? To answer this question, I consider three conditions that are commonly taken to be necessary for creativity. These are novelty, value, and agency. I argue that while contemporary AI models may have a claim to novelty and value, they cannot satisfy the kind of agency condition required for creativity. From this discussion, a new condition for creativity emerges. Creativity requires curiosity, a motivation to pursue epistemic (...) goods. I argue that contemporary AI models do not satisfy this new condition. Because they lack both agency and curiosity, it is a mistake to attribute the same sort of creativity to AI that we prize in humans. Finally, I consider the question of whether these AI models stand to make human creativity in the arts and sciences obsolete, despite not being creative themselves. I argue, optimistically, that this is unlikely. (shrink)

I argue for an account of creativity that unifies creative achievements in the arts, sciences, and other domains and identifies its characteristic value. This account draws upon case studies of creative work in both the arts and sciences to identify creativity as a kind of successful exploration. I argue that if creativity is properly understood in this way, then it is fundamentally a property of processes, something only agents can achieve, something that comes in degrees, subjectively novel, and non-formulaic. As (...) I develop the account, I show how it avoids challenges faced by other accounts of creativity, especially concerning creativity’s value. Hills and Bird (2018, 2019) have together argued that creativity is not necessarily valuable. My account challenges this view. If I am right that creativity is a kind of successful exploration, then creativity does have a characteristic value, specifically epistemic value. (shrink)

There is an underappreciated respect in which the widespread availability of generative artificial intelligence (AI) models poses a threat to human connection. My central contention is that human creativity is especially capable of helping us connect to others in a valuable way, but the widespread availability of generative AI models reduces our incentives to engage in various sorts of creative work in the arts and sciences. I argue that creative endeavors must be motivated by curiosity, and so they must disclose (...) the creative agent’s inquisitive self. It is through self-disclosure, including the disclosure of the inquisitive self, that we put ourselves in a position to be seen by and connect with others through our creative pursuits. Because relying on AI for certain generative tasks is less self-disclosive than the creative work such technologies supplant, this reliance threatens to weaken our connections to one another. (shrink)

Explaining how something is possible is a familiar and epistemically important achievement in both science and ordinary life. But a satisfactory general account of how-possibly explanation has not yet been given. A crucial desideratum for a successful account is that it must differentiate a demonstration that something is possible from an explanation of how it is possible. In this paper, I offer an account of how-possibly explanation that fully captures this distinction. I motivate my account using two cases, one from (...) ordinary life and one from ornithology. On my account, a how-possibly explanation is a greater achievement than a mere description of how a state of affairs might possibly obtain. In addition to being a potential explanation of why some state of affairs actually obtains, a how-possibly explanation must involve the relief of an imaginative frustration on the part of its recipient. When a recipient’s imaginative frustration is relieved, she does not just know that the state of affairs in question is possible, but is also able to imagine how it could possibly obtain. (shrink)

Presenting the first step-by-step commentary on Husserl’s Ideas I, Marcus Brainard’s Belief and Its Neutralization provides an introduction not only to this central work, but also to the whole of transcendental phenomenology. Brainard offers a clear and lively account of each key element in Ideas I, along with a novel reading of Husserl, one which may well cause scholars to reconsider many long-standing views on his thought, especially on the role of belief, the effect and scope of the epoché, and (...) the significance of the universal neutrality modification. (shrink)

This article deals with “epoch” and “epoché”, each of which plays a central role in Heribert Boeder’s thought. Because it understands itself as the building of rational wholes, or logoi, his thought - but also that which it builds - is termed the “logotectonic”. The first part of the article situates the logotectonic epoché in the phenomenological tradition, particularly with respect to its key manifestations in Husserl and Heidegger, while also setting it off from that tradition. It is shown to (...) be not a method of access to consciousness, to say nothing of a withholding of Being, but rather a fundamental reticence on the part of the inquirer with respect to what has been thought. It is an exclusion of one’s idiosyncrasies in order to approach what has been thought in and on its own terms. It is this new epoché, and it atone, that gives access to the epoch in Boeder’s sense. Each of three epochs of philosophy is governed by a unique principle, which is given voice in the wisdom proper to that epoch atone and to which philosophy responds (either negatively or positively). The character of this response is the basis of Boeder’s claim that the history of philosophy is the “crisis of principles.” The principle of a given epoch determines the tasks to be accomplished by the philosophy of that epoch. Once the full range of tasks is completed, the epoch is concluded, making way for a new principle and thus a new epoch. The succession of epochs comes to an end, however - in Hegel. In view of this end, the article then takes up the subsequent “periods” of thought: modernity and submodernity; it seeks to show briefly how neither constitutes an epoch, but also how the end of submodernity coincides with the opening up of the possibility of rescuing wisdom from its oblivion and granting it a present that makes dwelling possible once again. This is precisely task that moves the logotect and, by extension, the logotectonic. (shrink)

"Reality and Mystical Experience" proposes and demonstrates the use of a new hermeneutical tool for the study of philosophical and religious foundations. The tool, which I call "publicity-presence-awareness terminology," offers a way to examine, understand, and classify different conceptions about the nature of reality in terms of their different approaches to certain shared metaphysical problems. Such an analysis helps, in turn, to clarify the basis for and significance of mystical experience within these traditions. ;The schema proposed here is especially useful (...) for philosophical studies across differing worldviews because it accommodates both inter- and intracultural realities and truths. This project defines "reality" and "truth" in terms of "publicity" and "presence." The publicity-presence distinction proposed here provides, in turn, a formal, much more culturally neutral and thus useful version of the traditional "universal-particular" and "attribute-particular" distinctions. ;The project has two parts. Part One defines the terms that make up the schema; Part Two looks at what publicity-presence-awareness terminology might reveal about the metaphysical presuppositions of three different religious traditions: Madhyamaka Buddhism, Advaita-Vedanta Hinduism, and patristic Christianity. In each case, the analysis demonstrates how each religion offers a fundamentally different yet equally valid approach to metaphysical mystery. Taken together, the three studies show that insight into metaphysical ultimacy does not express itself within just one metaphysical paradigm but rather in a natural typology of metaphysical views--different species that express a common mystery in a variety of ways. Moreover, just as biological organisms must be well-formed in order to live, the three species of metaphysics examined here suggest certain parameters for well-formed, viable metaphysics. ;Part Two also shows how the metaphysical presuppositions of each view govern certain features of the mystical traditions. The three studies look at how mystical awareness is distinguished from conventional awareness within each context, and how mystical traditions might offer context-specific remedies for the metaphysical limitations of their parent religions. (shrink)

Explores complex questions about the nature of reality, philosophy, and religion, and how we reconcile our often-conflicting beliefs about these questions"--Provided by publisher.

This is the first book-length work by Heribert Boeder to appear in English. The essays brought together here, several of which are to be found only in this volume, bear witness to a new perspective on metaphysics, modernity, and so-called postmodernity. The "seditiousness" of Boeder's undertaking lies in his twofold intention: to explicate what has been thought in metaphysics, modernity, and postmodernity as self-contained, rational totalities--as history, world, and speech, respectively--and by means of those explications to recover dwelling as it (...) has been made visible in the "configurations of wisdom". He approaches each of these totalities by way of Heidegger's thought, which marks the limit of modernity and as such is pivotal to Boeder's enterprise. (shrink)

This book is the culmination of Heinrich Meier's acclaimed analyses of the controversial thought of Carl Schmitt. Meier identifies the core of Schmitt's thought as political theology—that is, political theorizing that claims to have its ultimate ground in the revelation of a mysterious or supra-rational God. This radical, but half-hidden, theological foundation unifies the whole of Schmitt's often difficult and complex oeuvre, cutting through the intentional deceptions and unintentional obfuscations that have eluded previous commentators. Relating this religious dimension to Schmitt's (...) support for National Socialism and his continuing anti-Semitism, Meier compels the reader to come to terms with the irreconcilable differences between political theology and political philosophy. His book will give pause to those who have tended to gloss over the troubling aspects of some of Schmitt's ideas. With editions in German, French, Italian, and now English, Meier's two books on Schmitt have dramatically reoriented the international debate about Carl Schmitt and his significance for twentieth-century political thought. "Standing far above the rest... is Heinrich Meier's new study, _Die Lehre Carl Schmitts_, which covers all of Schmitt's writings.... Meier's work has forced everyone to take a second look at the assumptions underlying Schmitt's better-known writings and reconsider some that have been ignored."—Mark Lilla, reviewing the German edition in _The New York Review of Books_. (shrink)

Heinrich Meier’s work on Carl Schmitt has dramatically reoriented the international debate about Schmitt and his significance for twentieth-century political thought. In _The Lesson of Carl Schmitt_, Meier identifies the core of Schmitt’s thought as political theology—that is, political theorizing that claims to have its ultimate ground in the revelation of a mysterious or suprarational God. This radical, but half-hidden, theological foundation underlies the whole of Schmitt’s often difficult and complex oeuvre, rich in historical turns and political convolutions, intentional deceptions (...) and unintentional obfuscations. In four chapters on morality, politics, revelation, and history, Meier clarifies the difference between political philosophy and Schmitt’s political theology and relates the religious dimension of his thought to his support for National Socialism and his continuing anti-Semitism. New to this edition are two essays that address the recently published correspondences of Schmitt—particularly with Hans Blumberg—and the light it sheds on his conception of political theology. (shrink)

_The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy_ provides an annual international forum for phenomenological research in the spirit of Husserl's groundbreaking work and the extension of this work by such figures as Scheler, Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer.

The thesis of this article is that in Husserlian phenomenology there is no opposition between theory and praxis. On the contrary, he understands the former to serve the latter, so as to usher in a new world. The means for doing is the phenomenological reduction or epoché. It gives the phenomenologist access to the starting point, the “first things,” and orients his/her striving towards reason and the renewal of humanity. Careful attention to the significance of the epoché also sheds light (...) on Husserl’s understanding of the relationship of phenomenology not only to philosophy but also to the other sciences. Though an exposition of the “phenomenology of the philosophical vocation” which Husserl sketched in the 1920s, e.g., in his Kaizo articles and lectures on first philosophy, the author seeks to shore up his thesis. (shrink)