“I don’t believe that arguing is usually the way we come up with good ideas. Argument might be an effective way of deciding which ideas to believe in. But adjudication is not creation. Safety inspections are important for deciding whether a building is sound. But safety inspections on their own don’t erect the building to be inspected.”
That’s Alexander Douglas (St. Andrews), in his newsletter, As Difficult as Rare, writing about philosophical creativity. He says “there’s a balance to be struck between regulating philosophical ideas through standards of argument and nurturing the creativity that generates ideas in the first place.”
He adds:
Arguments are, at best, the regulatory structure of philosophy. But we often tell our students that the regulatory structure is the thing itself! I think that this is dangerous. Students come away with the notion that their job is to argue for/against ideas, rather than to generate the ideas to argue for/against—that they are the building inspector rather than the builder, the accountant rather than the investor…
Not only can this intimidate people out of developing powerful, interesting ideas for which they don’t yet know if they can argue, it can also lead people into accepting the wrong ideas: those that meet current standards of argument, even when those standards miss some crucial insight—the philosophical equivalent of asbestos fireproofing. The greatest danger is that an overregulated thought-environment can quash the insight that would reveal the mistake in the regulations before it ever gets to appear.
Many years ago, Patricia Marino (Waterloo) wrote in a guest post here about how she “wanted to go beyond criticism.” She says: “I wanted to create something, and I wanted to take a stand not only on what I thought was wrong, but on what I thought was right.” Making a point similar to the one Douglas makes in the last line, above, she adds, “Lately… I feel like I’m running up against the limits of creativity in philosophy. One major problem with it, it seems to me, is that it seems to require framing your new thing with some accepted background framework or set of ideas or posing of the question.”
Similarly, Alexus McLeod (Indiana Bloomington), speaking in defense of pluralism in the discipline, writes, “Philosophy at its best is a kind of intellectual exploration, and the more methodological and stylistic constraints are placed on it, the less well it will function as such.” And Michaela McSweeney (Boston University), in an interview, once said, “I think of philosophy as partly a creative process and discipline, and I think it would be a tremendous shame if we lost sight of that part of things.”
If there is indeed “a balance to be struck between regulating philosophical ideas through standards of argument and nurturing the creativity that generates ideas in the first place,” one might ask where in the profession the need for this balance is most glaring.
Is it in the teaching of philosophy? If so, how does one better teach for imagination or creativity in philosophy?
Is it in an overcautiousness that comes from the demands of publishing and the gauntlet of peer review? What remedies are available there?
Is it in a failure to read philosophy for its creative aspects? If so, who are our exemplars of creativity in philosophy?
Discussion welcome.
“ One major problem with it, it seems to me, is that it seems to require framing your new thing with some accepted background framework or set of ideas or posing of the question.”
I’m sympathetic to most of the points made in this post, but this bit seems mistaken. Framing your big creative idea in terms related to those already in use is how you get people to actually read your paper, rather than just the abstract. New debates are best created out of existing ones, not out of the blue.
Maybe even more directly – debates need multiple participants, and the best way to get someone other than yourself to talk about what you’re interested in is to show how what you’re interested in is relevant to something they’ve already demonstrated interest in.
Being by academic standards, thought somewhat on the periphery; reading here, prompted by being interested, in a wish to perhaps keep abreast, and add to – in the hope that even the most pedestrian of comments, might help in some way – I find myself, almost against better judgement, jumping in. With no wish to bore…
“Expemplars of creativity in philosophy”?
So many, one slups exhausted in one’s chair.
– Likely any of the ‘canon’ one would read. But be sure, with the creative, if human ideals/ideas pursuing, the transmitting, transmitted from what they themselves have ingested must inevitably press its case(s), and Does come through.
– Also, I would lead – concerning creativity – any reader to those who have written, and there are many here too, who expressed their varying philosophic takes and ??? In verse.
I think the reason we focus so much on arguments for undergraduates is that they already have loads of philosophical opinions–but almost nothing when it comes to defenses of those opinions. Trying to get them into the habit of defending their views–on topics in religion, politics, love, sex, and ethics–is a valuable way to go, and it requires an emphasis on argumentation. Coming up with creative approaches to philosophical challenges almost seems like a more advanced task. Until they get into the habit of defending/evaluating views, emphasis on creativity of proposals can wait.
Of course, it takes a lot of creativity to come up with arguments too!
There’s a difference between “ideas” and opinions/views. Maybe students do often have the latter when they walk into the classroom, though often these are just their knee-jerk reactions to a preset list of options (set either by the instructor themselves, or the political situation, or whatever). What they usually don’t have is ideas, i.e., ways of thinking about the philosophical problems that actually bother them that are worth exploring further than they have so far. Philosophy classes CAN teach them how to generate and explore those ideas, and usually don’t.
I do think that we have to be wary about thinking that the creativity stuff is too hard and has to be left for later. Students are not all alike. Some of them find creative tasks more approachable than critical/evaluative tasks. Teachers of intro level courses especially should be really conscious of that. They should also, I think, be conscious that we’re introducing students to philosophy as a human practice, and only secondarily as an academic discipline.
I didn’t say the creativity bit is too hard. I think it’s not worth emphasizing if they haven’t learned how to evaluate ideas via argumentation. Hence the emphasis on argumentation.
I guess that’s how I was interpreting your statement that “creative approaches to philosophical challenges almost seems like a more advanced task.” It’s more advanced, but not harder? Also, if it’s not because it’s harder, why IS it that it shouldn’t be emphasized first?
There is still much to be said for the “playful” aspect of philosophy as shared exploration, putting on ideas as a child tries on a parent’s clothing.
Perhaps this aspect of philosophy is better served by (or more at home in) the continental tradition than in analytical styles of philosophy.
Imagination and joy in philosophy exists not only in crafting arguments but also in developing ideas to argue for or against those arguments.
I think we do the playful aspect of philosophy in the analytic tradition, too, though mostly in teaching. There is a lot of fun discussions/intellectual play around creative solutions to imagined scenarios in ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, and history of philosophy, for example. Some of the imaginative uses of analytic philosophy we have outsourced to science fiction, too.
Some speculations in response to Justin’s question about teaching philosophy…
A “coming up with ideas” unit might integrate nicely into an argument-based course. Here’s an example of an activity I recently discovered and hope to try soon: “Pick a real-world policy that implicates the Formula of Humanity (e.g., data privacy, medical consent). Identify (a) your stance and your reasons for holding it, (b) a shared motive with someone who disagrees (e.g., protect autonomy, reduce harm), and (c) one policy tweak that honors that shared motive.”
Doing activities like this might simultaneously practice critical thinking skills (argument analysis) and develop critical thinking dispositions (open-mindedness, charitability, etc.). I also wonder if this kind of addition to argumentative dialogue activities would make the value of arguments clearer to students who are more constructively minded, that is, who don’t see the point in debates that will change no one’s mind.
Outside of philosophy, and sometimes even within it, arguments are parts of rich social interactions. To give another example, many arguments are connected to questions in ways it might be helpful to make explicit. Teaching these other aspects of argumentative interactions, as opposed to just arguments, might be helpful to students.
So teaching arguments vs. teaching idea creation might not be zero-sum proposition.
There is nothing wrong with presenting a sound argument. But, I agree it need not be the deciding factor in whether or not an idea is explored. Ideas are just that, ideas, and not necessarily right or wrong. Asking questions about what is being put forward is what philosophy is all about.
I’m not convinced that creativity can be so cleanly separated from argument. It seems to me that most of the new ideas in philosophy that we might think of as creative are not had in isolation from argument, but come from reaction against and engagement with an old idea and argument, where the author has a feeling that something isn’t right and tries to articulate what is wrong. Some examples would be Kant, Heidegger, Lakatos, Kripke. They did come up with new insights, but they did so by trying to figure out what was wrong with a previous idea. Are there really examples of freestanding creativity?
There are good reasons to believe that, psychologically, analytical ability and creativity are mutually reinforcing. I don’t read Douglas as denying that, though the safety inspector analogy might misleadingly suggest it. I take his point to be that a culture that discourages people from sharing a thesis unless they have a strong argument for it is bad for philosophy.
No one would publish today Metaphysics, even less so On the Soul or Philosophical Investigations or TLP because of their one-paragraphs ideas not supported by extended arguments and well analyzed secondary literature. Never mind 0 footnotes! Paradoxically, these are some of the major works in our field. Yet, most of the articles in top peer reviewed journals have little impact on anything except author’s tenure
I completely agree that creativity is essential, and perhaps undervalued. For instance, I think we tend to downplay the importance of philosophically interesting suggestions which we have yet to find explicit arguments for.
But I find it difficult to tease apart my emerging creative ideas from the simultaneous sense that there are reasons supporting them. Ideas are philosophically interesting because they at least have the appearance of being rational, hence supported by reasons, and hence obeying some norms of argument, even if that’s only implicit in the beginning. I am not sure how to develop these ideas except by already engaging in *some* argumentative practice. The language of this piece suggests, at least to me, that there is some creative practice independent of the argumentative one.
I somewhat agree with you that there’s need for creativity in philosophy and I think that is the beauty of philosophy the ability to formulate an idea to shape the subject matter an idea different from the established one
“In the main, indeed, logic is not a productive tool so much as a weapon of defence. A man building up an intellectual system has to build like Nehemiah, with the sword in one hand and the trowel in the other. The imagination, the constructive quality, is the trowel, and argument is the sword. A wide experience of actual intellectual affairs will lead most people to the conclusion that logic is mainly valuable as a weapon wherewith to exterminate logicians.” –G.K. Chesterton
There is more to practicing philosophy than writing papers for publication. All the discourse, whether chatting over tea or back and forth in email, can have argumentation as part of the greater creativity. I shut down when the sparring becomes adversarial and legalistic.
Thank you for finding and quoting my post!
These are great questions at the end. Some of my tentative answers can be in a conversation I had with two wonderfully creative students in their magazine, Contralytic: https://www.contralytic.co.uk/conversations-with-contralytic/against-identity
This is partly an illustration of the perils of defining philosophy as a distinct discipline. When it is conceived of as a practice, or attitude, or stratum of intellectual work to be practiced across diverse disciplines with their own substantive matter of study, the world itself forces creativity onto philosophers by breaking old arguments with new facts.
Like David Amos, I am not convinced that there is a useful distinction between creativity and argument. David points out that much philosophical creativity comes from reaction to old ideas and arguments. I’d push the point further. Good philosophical argument typically requires creativity. The standard move of refuting someone’s general claim by coming up with a counterexample requires creativity. Not necessarily the most extreme kind of creativity, but it is still creativity nonetheless. (And some such cases are really very creative.) At the same time the value of an idea is not intrinsic, but depends on the context of a debate, and in particular whether the idea answers an important question better than other ideas or does something else that makes progress (e.g. by showing that some assumption that the debate was making is unwarranted). Either way, the value of a creative idea can only be shown by linking it to other ideas by means of argument. So worthwhile creativity shows its worth only through argument.
Alexander Douglas suggests that we should go easy on arguments, for and against, and should devote more time to coming up with ideas worth arguing about. There is an obvious problem with this. In philosophy, as elsewhere, people often come up with their best ideas in the course of argument. The starting point for creative philosophising is often the thought that ‘that can’t be right’. And it’s in the course of working out exactly what is wrong with ‘that’ (whatever ‘that’ may be ) or in arguing against it, that philosophers often come up with their most creative ideas. Thus Plato’s philosophy evolved in opposition to the Sophists; some of Aristotle’s key ideas were developed in opposition to Plato; Reid developed Scottish Common Sense philosophy in opposition to Hume; Frege invented the predicate calculus, in part to prove Kant wrong, and Russell and Moore developed some of their key theses in opposition to Kant and to the British idealists such as McTaggart and Bradley. Those with a wider knowledge of the History of Philosophy could probably multiply examples. Thus Douglas’s argument depends on a false dichotomy. Arguing and coming up with fresh ideas are not distinct activities, since fresh ideas are often devised in the course of argument.. Thus the policy Douglas advocates is not a sensible one and might even be counterproductive. We might end up with less ideas worth arguing about if we went easy on the arguments and spent more time trying to come up with fresh ideas.