Berys Gaut: Creativity & Irrationality

"Creativity and Irrationality"

In a tradition that stretches back to Plato, creativity in art has been held to require or standardly involve a large degree of irrationality. But there is a counter-tradition, traceable back to Aristotle, which holds that creativity is a rational disposition. Psychological and literary research by Kay Jamison and Arnold Ludwig, amongst others, has provided empirical support for the irrationalist view. In this talk I defend a variant of the rationalist account and show how it can accommodate the psychological evidence for irrational elements in creative activity.