Historically left to the margins, the topics of imagination and creativity have gained prominence in philosophy of science, challenging the once dominant distinction between ‘context of discovery’ and ‘context of justification’. The aim of this chapter is to explore imagination and creativity starting from issues within contemporary philosophy of science, making connections to these topics in other domains along the way. It discusses the recent literature on the role of imagination in models and thought experiments, and their comparison with fictions. (...) It then turns to the importance of constraints on imaginings in the scientific domain, as well as whether constraints can hinder creativity. The second part of the paper focuses on the social dimensions of science. It considers imagination and creativity of scientific communities, asks whether the institution of science promotes creativity (and whether we want it to) or if it encourages conservativeness, and ends with a reflection on the politics of imagination and creativity in science. (shrink)

While discussions of the imagination have been limited in philosophy of science, this is beginning to change. In recent years, a vast literature on imagination in science has emerged. This paper surveys the current field, including the changing attitudes towards the scientific imagination, the fiction view of models, how the imagination can lead to knowledge and understanding, and the value of different types of imagination. It ends with a discussion of the gaps in the current literature, indicating avenues for future (...) research. (shrink)

This article starts an engagement on the aesthetics of experiments and offers an account for analysing how aesthetics features in the design, evaluation and reception of experiments. I identify two dimensions of aesthetic evaluation of experiments: design and significance. When it comes to design, a number of qualities, such as simplicity, economy and aptness, are analysed and illustrated with the famous Meselson-Stahl experiment. Beautiful experiments are also regarded to make significant discoveries, but I argue against a narrow construal of experimental (...) aims. By drawing on the plurality of goals experimenters have and diversity of aesthetic responses, I argue that experiments are aesthetically appreciated both when they discover and when they produce disruptive results. (shrink)

This article seeks to analyze the theory of technology formulated by the philosopher Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979). It shows the ways in which the author repurposes fundamental concepts of classical aesthetics in order to formulate a theory of technology aimed at liberating both nature and humanity. To this end, we argue that Marcuse mobilizes the theories of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805). In the first part of the article, we tackle some important aspects of Kant’s and Schiller’s aesthetic theories. (...) We begin with an analysis of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), focusing on central concepts that would later be absorbed by Schiller and Marcuse. Next, we try to show the reception of the Third critique in Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795) and this author’s contribution to aesthetic studies within political thought. In the second part, we focus on Marcuse’s work, highlighting two key moments in his analysis on technology. We show that his theory undergoes transformation and development until it reaches its stable form in the 1960s and 1970s, during which the author proposes a new theory of technology based on human aesthetic possibilities whose goal is the liberation of nature. (shrink)

The Analytic of the Beautiful in Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgment is a text of unparalleled importance in the history of philosophical aesthetics. Its main claims are adopted by some and rejected by others. A significant number of responses, of both kinds, take the Analytic to apply to all experiences of beauty—most notably, to the beauty of both nature and fine art. Our principal claim is that this assumption is mistaken. The analysis in the misleadingly titled Analytic of the Beautiful (...) applies paradigmatically to judgments of natural beauty. The experience of the beauty of most artworks is different and requires a separate analysis. We detail the modifications required in all four moments of the Analytic and thereby explicate the experience of artistic beauty. This reveals that Kant holds an interesting and historically consequential account of the experience of artistic beauty, which is significantly different from the experience of natural beauty. The analysis further reveals that despite these significant differences, the experiences are both species of a single genus. (shrink)

In philosophical discourse, vagueness is commonly regarded as an undesirable and problematic aspect of human experience. Such standpoints are not unfounded. However, in this article, I argue that vagueness may in certain instances also possess an instrumental role that supports specific modes of human aspiration, including the artistic and the mathematical. In particular, I investigate the ways in which vagueness not only hinders but also fosters the emergence of an aesthetic quality of experience during the imaginative endeavours of fine art (...) and mathematics. The manner in which the benefit from felt vagueness ties into the formation of artistic and mathematical scenarios helps to illuminate deep and often unnoticed relations between these two domains of human ingenuity. In this article, the overall concept of experience and the particular features of human experience, such as the aesthetic and the vague, are examined in the context of John Dewey’s philosophical pragmatism. In Dewey’s philosophical framework, the human mind and culture are understood as natural phenomena. As such, the Deweyan approach fits the paradigm of a twenty-first century scientific understanding of the inherent ontological unity of all modes of human existence and activity. (shrink)

Some experimental results in science are productively surprising or beautiful. Such results are disruptive in their epistemic nature: by violating epistemic expectations they mark the phenomenon at hand as worthy of further investigation. Could it be that there are emotions beyond these two which are also useful for the epistemic evaluation of scientific experiments? Here, I conduct a structured sociological survey to explore affective experiences in scientific experimental research. I identify that learning the results of an experiment is the high (...) emotional point in the experimenting process. Thus, experimental results can be challenging, beautiful, or boring, and they can worry, amuse, make one sad, and so on. They can also drive meta-cognitive evaluations as well as motivate specific research-related actions. From this, I advance two claims: that emotions beyond surprise and disruptive beauty are epistemically useful in empirical research, and that emotions help to overcome specific challenges of reasoning about new experimental results. (shrink)

The standard view in current philosophy of creativity says that being creative has two requirements: being novel and being valuable. The standard view on creativity has recently become an object of critical scrutiny. Hills and Bird have specifically proposed to remove the value requirement from the definition, as it is not clear that creative objects are necessarily valuable or creative people necessarily praiseworthy. In this paper, I argue against Hills and Bird, since eliminating the element of value from the explanation (...) of creativity hinders the understanding of the role that creative products play in actual epistemic practices, which are fundamentally normative. More specifically, I argue that the terms ‘creativity’ and ‘creative’ function as thick epistemic concepts when employed by competent epistemic agents in practice, that is, these concepts have both a descriptive and an evaluative content that cannot be disentangled from one another. Accordingly, I suggest that philosophers should prefer thick accounts over thin accounts of creativity. A thick account of creativity is one that endorses the standard view at its basis, but further develops it in two ways: by stressing the entanglement of the value and novelty requirements; by permitting to encompass a range of domain-specific characterizations of such entanglement for different epistemic situations. In order to take the first steps in the development of such a thick account of creativity, I look at the domain of scientific practices as a case in point, and try to spell out what the thickness of creative instances typically entails here. Namely, I identify the worthy novelty of creative models and methods with their potential to clarify a tradition, with fruitfulness, and with the fulfilment of exploratory aims. (shrink)

This paper attempts to revive the epistemological discussion of scientific articles. What are their epistemic aims, and how are they achieved? We argue that scientific experimental articles are best understood as a particular kind of narrative: i.e., modernist narratives (think: Woolf, Joyce), at least in the sense that they employ many of the same techniques, including colligation and the juxtaposition of multiple perspectives. We suggest that this way of writing is necessary given the nature of modern science, but it also (...) has specific epistemic benefits: it provides readers with an effective way to grasp the content of scientific articles which increases their understanding. On the other hand, modernist writing is vulnerable to certain kinds of epistemic abuses, which can be found instantiated in modern scientific writing as well. (shrink)